The essays in Victorian Animal Dreams add to an increasingly rich body of scholarship that some call “animal studies,” and, like much of that scholarship, this collection reaches widely to capture a sense of a relationship that, on the surface, seems ineffable—namely, the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Each of the essays in this volume traces the human/nonhuman frontier, using Victorian literary sources ranging from scientific texts by Darwin and his contemporaries to novels, diaries, and travel narratives.

For those familiar with scholarly work on animals, the Victorian period is not a new setting. Harriet Ritvo's trailblazing work, The Animal Estate (Cambridge, MA, 1987), masterfully demonstrated the relationship between Englishness and otherness by studying the English and “other creatures” in the Victorian era. Likewise, there seems to be nothing terribly new about using literature to recover “elusive Victorian attitudes towards animals” (9). Jennifer Mason's Civilized Creatures (Baltimore, 2005) does as much with American literature.

Two things, however, mark this volume as a valuable contribution to “animal studies.” First, the editors, Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, have collected essays that move between England, India, Africa, and beyond without being overly concerned with national or even imperial boundaries. The result is that the conversation about the human/nonhuman frontier finds itself contextualized against a much broader historical context, one in which science, power, metaphor, literature, and even animals were always already manifestations of colonialism's inherent ambivalences.

Second, this volume has managed to negotiate one of the fault lines of “animal studies.” Those drawn to this “field,” if a field is what it has become, seem always to be engaged in a conversation that crosses temporal boundaries. Animal rights activism, pet ownership, and vegetarianism are all contemporary topics held over from the past, a fact recognized by theorists like Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. The essays in this volume interrogate a specific set of literary texts while simultaneously grappling with complex existential questions about the nature of the human/nonhuman relationship. Thus, the volume moves from Kipling's Jungle Book to the Kyoto Protocol, from Koko the gorilla to Wuthering Heights, and from a CBS news story about the cruelty of boiling live lobsters to anecdotes of Darwin's early adventures in beetle collecting (and tasting) without ever losing sight of the balance among content, analysis, and theory. That balance alone makes this volume worth reading, and not just for those interested in “animal studies.”

The volume is divided into three sections—“Science and Sentiment,” “Sex and Violence,” and “Sin and Bestiality”—that offer a rough rubric for reading the essays, but none of these subdivisions necessarily coheres as an obvious analytical block. Part 3 (“Sin and Bestiality”) comes closest to doing so, but its success is largely a by-product of the strength of the section's five essays. Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge's “The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the Nineteenth Century” merits mention as the strongest essay in this section, and perhaps in the whole volume. Moving from Thomas De Quincy's sexualized reptilian fantasies in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) to J. M. Barrie's exploitation of the crocodile's overdetermined metaphorical meanings in Peter Pan (1904), the essay traces crocodilian metaphors ranging from the crocodile as embodiment of colonial alterity, to the crocodile as mere collectible (as in shoes, wallets, and purses), and finally to the crocodile as parody.

One might rightly criticize Ashgate for the way it has published the twenty-nine plates that accompany these essays. Bound collectively at the volume's center, the images are disassociated from their proper place in the text of each essay, which is a shame particularly relative to Susan Bernstein's “Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals, and Gender,” Alan Rouch's “The Sins of Sloths: The Moral Status of Fossil Megatheria in Victorian Culture,” and the above-mentioned “The Empire Bites Back,” all of which are enriched by their visual accompaniments. The decision to print only details from Ford Madox Brown's painting Work and Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience is particularly vexing given the central role those images play in Martin Danahay's “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in Victorian Art.”

One might also argue that this volume, which the editors herald for its “interdisciplinary approach” (9), might benefit from yet more interdisciplinarity. In a succinct but illuminating afterword to the volume, Harriet Ritvo reminds us why her work remains the gold standard for scholarship in “animal studies.” She notes that one of the values of animal studies is that it accesses the nexus where a great many analytical perspectives meet. In referencing C. P. Snow's influential The Two Cultures, Ritvo seems to gesture toward work in fields other than literary studies that might productively be read alongside these essays, works like D. Graham Burnett's Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton, NJ, 2007).

The relationship between humans and nonhumans has always been about more than meets the eye. It has always been about boundaries of law and power, gender and sexuality, nation and empire, the sciences and the humanities, violence and civilization. Without great care, Ritvo suggests, scholarly efforts to surpass the boundaries between “human” and “animal” run the risk of reinforcing the divide. The very act of contesting the human/nonhuman frontier, Ritvo argues, serves as a “grudging acknowledgement that this boundary is widely recognized and powerfully influential” (271). Complicating the human/nonhuman frontier, then, requires us to problematize many other boundaries, and “animal studies” is well placed to do this sort of analytical work because it exists simultaneously distinct from and marginal to many different disciplines and fields. “Animal studies” is, then, an ideal meeting ground for scholars of all stripes, an ideal place to interrogate assumptions and categories not merely as academics but as members in a much larger zoological community. After all, as Ritvo reminds us, humans ought not to exclude themselves from “animal studies.”