Exploring the significance of animals in Romantic-period writing, this new study shows how in this period they were seen as both newly different from humankind (subjects in their own right, rather than simply humanity's tools or adjuncts) and also as newly similar, with the ability to feel and perhaps to think like human beings.

Contents: Introduction: 'Animals are good to think with'; Animals dead and alive: pets, and politics poetry in the Romantic period; Children's animals: Locke, Rousseau, Coleridge and the instruction/imagination debate; Political animals: bull-fighting, bull-baiting and Childe Harold I; Animals as food: Shelley, Byron and the ideology of eating; Animals and nature: beasts, birds and Wordsworth's ecological credentials; Evolutionary animals: science and imagination between the Darwins; In conclusion: animals then and now; Index.