In his introduction to this collection, Frank Palmeri situates the volume within the interdisciplinary field of animal studies. It would, however, be a shame for those outside this subfield to miss these engaging and provocative essays, for the purpose of the volume is not merely to reconstruct the lives of animals in the long eighteenth century (1660–1832) but also,and more significantly, to investigate the representation of animals and the relationships between humans and other animals in this period. The result is a volume that presents animals as a new type of subaltern subject, thereby rendering the study of animals more than an interdisciplinary subfield. Indeed, this collection of essays adeptly demonstrates that eighteenth-century views on nonhuman animals were woven into broader conversations about science, race, and identity. In short, this collection verifies Claude Lévi-Strauss's assertion that animals are good to think with.

The eleven essays in this volume can be divided into five subsets. The first, consisting of an essay by Chi-ming Yang and another by Theresa Braunschneider, explores the tangled intersections of species and race. The following essays, by Christina Malcolmson and Allen Michie, build on this theme through their exploration of hybridity in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Three subsequent essays by Palmeri, Arline Meyer, and Richard Nash, respectively, explore the themes of power, science, and representation. Two essays, one by Stephanie Rowe and another by Lisbeth Chapin, offer compelling new studies of the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. The final two essays draw the themes of the volume into the late twentieth century. Jonathan Lamb accomplishes this task by juxtaposing Gulliver's Travels with J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, while Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds focuses on the slippery boundaries between humans and other animals in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

The scope of the essays described above might seem impossibly diverse, and there are moments when this collection could cohere more effectively. The three essays by Palmeri, Meyer, and Nash do not operate as a group as fully as do Malcolmson and Michie's studies of Gulliver's Travels. Similarly, the final two essays lack coherence as a grouping, and their collective focus on twentieth-century texts and themes distracts from the volume's stated chronological focus. Palmeri is to be credited, however, for an outstanding introduction that successfully holds this volume together. As he notes, all of the essays share “a practice of cultural analysis combining historical and interpretive work in the study of changing conceptions of relations between humans and non-human animals” (2).

Michel Foucault argued that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project held a classificatory impulse at its core, and that impulse is very much present in these essays. To define nonhuman animals as such is to define the other vis-à-vis the self. As Nash notes, Carolus Linnaeus was committed to this empiricist project; he was “determined that the world—being not infinite, but only vast—was susceptible to being named exhaustively, and that the bible clearly enjoined mankind to such an undertaking” (106). What makes these essays so interesting is that they adeptly demonstrate how fragile a structure scientific taxonomy actually was for eighteenth-century observers. At the same moment when Linnaeus was scientifically labeling each type of animal, domestic pet ownership was growing in popularity. The science of binomial nomenclature, therefore, emerged alongside a flourishing culture of specific proper names for individual animals. Both Palmeri, in his introduction, and Yang build on this tension between self and other, offering the Eastern theory of metempsychosis as a destabilizing alternative to rigid taxonomies of identity. As Yang suggests, “an itinerant soul wandering between bodies—a potential indication of difference lodged within oneself—is considered the stuff of myth” (15). However, as other essays in this volume demonstrate, destabilizing mythologies were rather common in this period.

Nowhere are such myths more suggestive than in the essays that focus on Gulliver's Travels and Frankenstein, particularly those by Malcolmson, Michie, and Rowe. In these essays, we see instances of eighteenth-century hybridity at its most complex. In Frankenstein's monster, we have a hybrid creation crafted from parts of humans and other animals. Gulliver's hybridity is less obvious but equally powerful. With the body of a Yahoo and the intelligence of a Houyhnhnm, Gulliver is manifestly not a pure example of either. Neither Frankenstein's monster nor Gulliver fits into his world, precisely because the readers of both novels approach the texts with clear ideas about the categories that divide humans from animals. In both instances, difference and hybridity stand out against normative expectations and clearly defined categories. Gulliver and the monster are the exceptions that prove the rule. But the reality is still more complicated, because both Gulliver and the monster are simultaneously the exceptions that fracture preconceptions about taxonomic categories. As hybrid forms, both are unique specimens—the exemplars of radical individualism drawn to its extreme.

These eleven essays detail the intricate tensions between the collective and the specific and between the human and the nonhuman, but they do not stop there. They offer up the boundary that marks humans apart from other animals as part of the Enlightenment's classificatory impulse, and in doing so, they suggestively place the study of animals in history at the epicenter of a rich body of scholarship. As Palmeri notes, the study of animals has emerged as a subfield of its own, but this is a volume that deserves the attention of a much wider audience.