The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies critically investigates current topics and disciplines that are affected, enriched or put into dispute by the burgeoning scholarship on Animal Studies. What new questions and modes of research need come into play if we are to seriously acknowledge our entanglements with other animals? World-leading scholars from a range of disciplines, such as Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Art, Biosemiotics, Ethology and Geography, set the agenda for Animal Studies today. Rather than a narrow specialism, this book shows how we think of other animals to...

In Beasts of Burden, Ron Broglio examines how lives--human and animal--were counted in rural England and Scotland during the Romantic period. During this time, Britain experienced unprecedented data collection from censuses, ordinance surveys, and measurements of resources, all used to quantify the life and productivity of the nation. It was the dawn of biopolitics--the age in which biological life and its abilities became regulated by the state. Borne primarily by workers and livestock, nowhere was this regulation felt more powerfully than in the fields, commons, and enclosures. Using...