INTRODUCTION

I

As a disruptive or counterintuitive experience, the counterhuman presents a persistent challenge and opportunity for explication and for methodological innovation—a challenge that is endemic to its premise and that is also, symptomatically, relevant to current approaches that question the authority or naturalness or individuality of the human. A significant and fertile corollary to the methodology of the counterhuman imaginary is to be found in the “affective turn.”¹⁷ A key dimension of affect theory pursues a perspective that intersects directly with the counterhuman through the experience of interrelationality. “In-between-ness” or “occurent relation,” to use Brian Massumi’s working terms, offers a methodological avenue along which the counterhuman might intersect with the transindividual.¹⁸ In Massumi’s words,

If there is one key term [in the definition of affect], that’s it: relation. When you start in-between, what you’re in the middle of is a region of relation.…

But it is even more important to realize that “pre-subjective” in this usage means transindividual.… First, in the sense … that it pertains directly to what is passing between the individuals involved, which is reducible to neither taken separately. And second, in the sense that it coincides with a becoming of the involved individuals.¹⁹

Following Massumi, Stephen Ahern in “Affect Theory Reads the Age of Sensibility” directly raises the issue of species difference. Ahern argues in his explication of “moments of affective agitation [in] the face-to-face encounter with alterity … that affect is autonomous (even ‘pre-personal’)” and characterized “by the modulations of a ‘field of forces.’ ” And he suggests that “such modulations can be analyzed in a dynamic system that includes affectual relations among human, animal, and even inorganic actants.” Ahern thus claims that affect theory promises

a breaking through of the categories of difference that keep us apart—an effacing of socioeconomic, generational, gendered, racial, even species difference. It’s as if in moments of suspension, when bodies are impinging on one another, affecting and affected, but between states, in an in-between-ness that affect theorists have sought to highlight, in a not-yet state of potential for change, there is a space for neutrality in which power imbalances might be cancelled out, and affective assemblages created that offer newly born communities primed to act, resistant to dualistic thinking, of the reign of me versus you, of us versus them.²⁰

We will see a performance of this in-between-ness from the perspective of the counterhuman imaginary in the analysis of “species intimacies” in chapter 1. There, as we see in the lapdog lyric and the circulation narrative, the suffusion of the human into the other-than-human and the destabilization of human affectivity through transspecies melding use radical interrelationality to step beyond conventional or hierarchical boundaries and to project an experience of ontological uncertainty—even of an innovative “community”—indigenous to the counterhuman.

The concept of the disruptive impact of the counterhuman finds another corollary methodology in revisionist approaches to the definition of the human itself. Lynn Festa’s rich and detailed account of the function of the other-than-human in eighteenth-century literature, Fiction without Humanity, argues that “person and thing, human and animal, are intertwined rather than opposed”: “Rather than starting from a presumptive (human) subject and adding predicates or appealing to preestablished binaries of person and thing, human and animal, I show how writers use anthropomorphized animals and personified things to investigate humanity’s own creaturely and thinglike nature.”²¹ The consequence for Festa’s analysis is that literature enables readers “to adopt [the] radically new and alien perspectives” (35) of objects, instruments, or animals. By doing so, literature “produces”—or “elicits,” “interpellates,” “projects,” “performs,” or “constitutes”—the human, by using “anthropomorphized animals and personified things to investigate humanity’s own creaturely and thinglike nature” (60, 8, 9, 15, 2). The “radical” or “alien” dissonance between the interpellated human and other-than-human “forces” here is our common conceptual problematic (4). Both for Festa’s argument and for the concept of the counterhuman imaginary, that dissonance provides an ongoing methodological challenge and opportunity. Like Festa’s “processual” model (31), the counterhuman imaginary also positions—or destabilizes—the human as the product of a process of interpellation. And the counterhuman imaginary—also like Festa’s process—locates the other-than-human in disruptive proximity to human assertions of authority. But in this study, the counterhuman systematically foregrounds and explicates the “radically new and alien” form of that dissonance, in order to generate a methodology that makes the experience of the other-than-human perceptible on an axis counter to, rather than—as for Festa—constitutive of or absorbed by, the human.

And this experience of perceptibility also has an illuminating point of contact with Bill Brown’s definition of “things-in-themselves” in “Things—in Theory,” the opening chapter of Other Things. In this essay, Brown offers a “clarification”—in the form of a kind of reverse provocation: “My concern is not with whether you succeed or fail to grasp things-in-themselves, objects as they are. My concern is how objects grasp you.”²² How objects grasp you is a subject-oriented expression of the meta-paradox at hand for The Counterhuman Imaginary. Working through Heidegger, DeLillo, and Lacan, Brown here describes the meta-paradox of the thing variously and eloquently. It is “immediate,” “self-contained,” and “independent”; it demonstrates a “stubborn evasion … from our thought,” a “self-refusal,” and an “unconditioned autonomy” that reflects “the abyss of the real.” It “discloses itself” only through “accident, confusion, emergency, contingency,” and then only through the work of art.²³ As we shall see, the concept of the counterhuman specifies this autonomy and this abyss by enabling the self-efficacious forces of the other-than-human to disclose themselves through the counterhuman dimensions of literary creativity.

This disclosure—the “radical and alien” impact of how objects grasp you—is aligned with the recent engagement with “postcritique”: the turn from the skeptical, diagnostic, symptomatic, suspicious, or oppositional modes of analysis that have characterized modern literary critique. In the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski provide an overview and evaluation of “critique as a genre”:

While the association of critique with self-questioning extends back to Kant, it is heightened and intensified in the “dramas of exposure” that characterize contemporary forms of interpretation. Whatever is natural, taken for granted, essentialized, or transparent becomes the critic’s target: such qualities are seen as not only theoretically inadequate (in failing to acknowledge the linguistic and cultural construction of reality), but also politically troubling (in “naturalizing” social phenomena and thereby rendering them immune to criticism and change). As a result, critique has encouraged a recurring preoccupation with second-order or meta-analysis and a seemingly inexhaustible relay of skepticism and disclosure: hermeneutic insight emerges only to become the object of further suspicion, lest it fall prey to the stable, authentic, or authoritative knowledge that critique seeks to challenge. Demanding a hyper-vigilance on the part of the critic, critique thus requires stringent self-critique and continued attempts to second-guess or “problematize” one’s own assumptions.²⁴

The broad effort of postcritique is to highlight an immediate engagement with the text—this engagement involves, for Felski and Anker, “treating texts with respect, care, and attention, emphasizing the visible rather than the concealed in a spirit of dialogue and constructiveness rather than dissection and diagnosis.… What gets built and shaped when a critic reads? What affordances and opportunities does literary form and experience open up?”²⁵ Recent claims for “surface reading,” “thin description,” or “reparative reading” foreground the affirmation, embodiment, and autonomy that emerge from that experience and that attention.²⁶ Jonathan Culler, for example, describes the “capacious appreciation” of the text that results from his approach to poetry in his Theory of the Lyric: “our attention should be directed to experiencing the poem itself as an event.”²⁷

The concept of the counterhuman imaginary steers literary interpretation between critique and postcritique, by moving through the constructivist hermeneutic insight of the Althusserian or Castoriadian imaginary to a first-order experience of the impact of the other-than-human on and through the literary text—in an immediate grasp of the self-efficacy of matter, a sustained implication in intra-activity, a “radical” overwriting of species boundaries and of affects, or a self-efficacious manifestation of pervasive, horizontal, unwitnessed turbulence. An account and an “appreciation” of how a poem might grasp the reader as an event locates counterhuman interpretation within rather than beyond the text.

The idea of the counterhuman also points toward the posthuman—a current concept with a wide scope, which Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman has described as the “explosion” or the “qualitative shift in our thinking about … the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet.”²⁸ Posthumanism—or, variously, transhumanism, hyperhumanism, antihumanism, or metahumanism—has developed across the arenas of critical and cultural theory, anthropology, molecular biology, technology, neuroscience, environmental studies, and quantum physics.²⁹ Braidotti offers a summary account of “the common denominator for the posthuman”: “an assumption about the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself … supported by a monistic philosophy, which rejects dualism, especially the opposition nature-culture, and stresses instead the self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter.”³⁰ Francesca Ferrando’s systematic account of the scope of the perspective of the posthuman further engages anthropocentrism and speciesism:

Posthumanism is often defined as a post-humanism and a post-anthropocentrism: it is “post” to the concept of the human and to the historical occurrence of humanism, both based … on hierarchical social constructs and human-centric assumptions. Speciesism has turned into an integral aspect of the posthuman critical approach. The posthuman overcoming of human primacy, though, is not to be replaced with other types of primacies.… Posthumanism is a post-centralizing, in the sense that it recognizes not one but many specific centers of interest; it dismisses the centrality of the centre in its singular form, both in its hegemonic as in its resistant modes.… Its perspectives have to be pluralistic, multilayered, and as comprehensive and inclusive as possible.… Posthumanism does not stand on a hierarchical system: there are no higher and lower degrees of alterity, when formulating a posthuman standpoint, so that the non-human differences are as compelling as the human ones. Posthumanism is a philosophy which provides a suitable way of departure to think in relational and multi-layered ways, expanding the focus to the non-human realm in post-dualistic, post-hierarchical modes, thus allowing one to envision post-human futures which will radically stretch the boundaries of human imagination.³¹

This “radical” “stretching”—toward what might even be termed an inexpressible realm beyond the human—first requires, for a human approach to posthumanism, a foothold in the counterhuman: the counterhuman imaginary supplies a formal locus for the experience of the posthuman. The aspects of the counterhuman that become visible through an explication of the contrapuntal effects that accrue to the presumed authority of the human cultural imaginary offer a means of approaching that “radical” space “beyond the boundaries of human imagination”—a glimpse of the “self-organizing force” of the other-than-human that is otherwise inaccessible to the human.

In animal studies, new materialist theory, and environmental or geohistorical criticism, the notion of the “actuality” of animals, the “independence” of things, or the immediacy of the human “reckoning” with nature all project—as the ultimate scene of analysis—a lifeworld to which, as we have seen, literature is asserted to have a special access. That claim to access often unproblematically assumes—even asserts—the efficacy, the power, and the authority of the human. But if we take on the literary experience of the other-than-human from the perspective of the human cultural imaginary, and if we focus then on relations within that imaginary scenario rather than on some purported reality beyond it, and if, within that realm, we provide an account of the self-efficacy of the other-than-human as a contrapuntal engagement that operates against or beyond or tangentially through human representation, then animals, things, or environmental and geological factors can be seen to exert a distinctive force—a “self-organizing” efficacy—even within the “indisputable and undisputed” meaning-making by which human being imagines its own existence. The premise of this study, then, is that animals, things, and environmental and geological elements and events are always generating counterhuman pressures on human discourse—they are always generating a counterhuman imaginary. A systematic attention to those counterhuman pressures offers insights that look across the broad range of “posthuman” perspectives that have variously sought to engage the other-than-human: affect theory, new materialism, animal studies, and ecocriticism.

This study tests the analytical opportunities provided by the notion of the counterhuman imaginary by focusing on a diverse set of influential literary texts from the early eighteenth century in England. These pressures of the other-than-human within the human imagination belong to the whole history of human creativity. But the particular historical context of this book illuminates the status of the counterhuman imaginary at a significant moment in the history of humans, animals, and the geographical and environmental realm—a moment that involves what is often understood as the constitution of human modernity. As I have argued elsewhere, the transformations in economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history that mark this moment—the rapid and substantial developments in production, profit, and trade; in exploration, expansion, and imperialism; in urbanization, bureaucracy, and the extension of private property; and in approaches to metaphysics, ontology, and to the understanding of the material world—are all variously and powerfully felt in and through the literary imagination in the eighteenth century.³²

The texts studied here reflect a sample of scenarios from across these transformations and thus offer a set of particular opportunities to discover and define the impact of the counterhuman on distinctive occasions in the human engagement with the cultural imaginary—with the representation of “ ‘this world’ and ‘what is’ possible” in the English eighteenth century. The transformative shift in the metaphysical and empirical conceptualization of the hierarchy of being—the replacement of the “chain” with new principles of continuity and plenitude—creates an opportunity for the generic innovation produced by the counterhuman melding of beings analyzed in chapter 1. The Newtonian reshaping of “the entire conception of matter” provides an immediately pertinent condition for the analysis of counterhuman force in chapter 2 as well as in chapter 3.³³ Meanwhile trade, circulation, and the proliferative presence of the marketplace shape the urban context of The Dunciad in chapter 3 and the global scenario of the circulating banknote in chapter 1. Chapter 4 on the Lisbon earthquake tests the relevance of the counterhuman to a singular, specific, global geologic event—the transformation of the Earth itself on the date of November 1, 1755, human time—and explores the intersections of that event with Enlightenment discourse and debate. And the rise in the urgency, distribution, and asserted authority of modern reporting and journalism is a core context for chapter 5 on the Great Storm of 1703. Exposing the operations of the disruptive forces of the other-than-human within the human cultural imaginary at this particular and transitional juncture in the history of human creativity—the English eighteenth century—calls attention to both the specificity and the breadth of the counterhuman. And meanwhile, the distinctive scenarios considered here may also offer, in turn, models for other, ongoing accounts of the vitality and self-efficacy of the other-than-human across the larger-than-human history.

II

The chapters that follow focus on five distinct instances of the literary enactment of the counterhuman imaginary that engage these historical transformations, building through the explication of each text or literary form a critical method that attends to the dynamic of the other-than-human, within and beyond the human cultural imaginary. These chapters track the scope of the emergence of the other-than-human across prose fiction and journalistic narrative, lyric and narrative poetry, and canonical works and popular subgenres, to emphasize the pervasiveness of the other-than-human in the literary culture of this period, which is conventionally and famously associated with the “rise of the novel” and the primacy of the human, individualist protagonist. And these distinct explications of the counterhuman also track the range of its demeanors in relation to the literary imagination. In these texts, the “radical” “stretching” of the boundaries of the human imagination entailed by the counterhuman takes corollary forms, which align with the intrinsic force, the self-efficacy, and the uncentered interrelationality of the posthuman. The uncentered relationality of the counterhuman can generate a systematic ontological uncertainty that unseats the centrality of human affect and “love” by representing intimacies across forms of being and of matter, thus usurping the affective properties of the human. The counterhuman can indicate the energy of the material other-than-human thing to move “on its own”—its “inexpressible” force and its intrinsic capacity to populate the world through a proliferative sequence of accumulation. It can pointedly replace human being with moving matter that operates through an ongoing “intra-action” or fluctuation or flattening and that intimates—more broadly—an ultimate “chaos” or “abyss” or even the “uncreation” or the transcendence of the human. And the counterhuman can be projected beyond human authority, as an unaccountable multiplicity, an inexplicable and immediate force, or as an impossible confluence irrelevant to human agency—a “tumbling,” cascading, unlimited, and undirected flood.

Movement beyond the bounds of human convention is a key scenario for the counterhuman imaginary across a range of literary contexts. Chapter 1, “Species Intimacies: Lapdogs and Banknotes,” argues that two popular eighteenth-century subgenres—one depicting lapdogs and the other generating protagonists from banknotes, sedan chairs, and overcoats—create corollary counterhuman experiments in multiplicity and immeasurability. This chapter juxtaposes the lapdog lyric and the circulation narrative in order to explore imaginative scenarios that focus on affective substitution and “love.” Both the lapdog lyric and the circulation narrative place human being into surprising, direct, intimate contact with the other-than-human. The circulation narrative uses that contact to represent the affective merging of the human with the material thing in the form of a thing-protagonist; that thing-protagonist exhibits a suffusion with human emotion in a way that ultimately makes the thing into a human equivalent. In the case of the lapdog lyric, the poetry celebrating the “love” between the lady and the lapdog consistently represents a corporeal cross-species intimacy that challenges human-centered conventions of affinity. Both of these subgenres reach toward a counterhuman imagining of affect based on an unconventional or immeasurable experience of cross-species movement.

“Active Matter, Vital Force: The Mobilization of Matter: Newton and Defoe,” Chapter 2, lays out the discursive underpinnings of other-than-human force for the modern imagination through a comparison of Newton’s Optics and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In the language of the Optics, the focus on “experienced bodies” asserts the capacity of matter to attract or pull or “act,” an agency that is itself enacted in Newton’s gravitational theory. In Defoe’s narrative, also, things act by populating the “desert” island through the ongoing activity of irresistible succession: the autonomous generation of things from things. This chapter argues that these corollary discourses of autonomy and of irresistible succession create a form of counterhuman motion, in which matter moves beyond or without or separately from the human. Both Newton’s and Defoe’s texts show matter moving and demonstrate a counterhuman imaginative impact irrelevant to the conventional critical focus on the agency of the novelistic human protagonist.

Irresistible motion connects the counterhuman impact of the Optics and Robinson Crusoe with Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic poem The Dunciad. Chapter 3, “The Uncreation of the Human: Pope’s Dunciad,” takes up the “force inertly strong” that flows through The Dunciad’s extended scenario of other-than-human realms and that carries along and across those realms the whole human population of London authors and booksellers, all made into matter.³⁴ A close reading of The Dunciad from the perspective of gravity provides a methodology for an analysis of the force of the counterhuman imaginary, exercised despite and against the human. Beginning with an account of the poem’s ongoing materialization of human being and next describing the processes by which all of those material objects are gathered, assembled, and entangled in a turbulent state of chaos beyond human convention or law, this chapter accounts for the poem’s ultimate, impossible achievement of “a new world to Nature’s laws unknown.”³⁵

Chapter 4, “ ‘When Time Shall End’: Poetry of the Lisbon Earthquake,” uses the opportunity of the largest earthquake in human history to analyze the literary representation, in the contemporary poetry, of a specific and singular geologic event. On the one hand, these poems can be described as “interchangeable,” in that their use of tropes of “disaster discourse”—lists of innumerable human victims—seems to offer only convention, instead of a specific attention to this distinctive event: the other-than-human realm seems to escape human representation. But the evocation of multiplicity itself in these poems offers a starting point for a counterhuman explication. And then, the turn in these poems from a diffuse multiplicity to a powerful, immediate singularity—“the Earthquake now!”—points to an other-than-human power that links the earthquake poetry with the coming of “chaos” of The Dunciad. The ultimate moment of counterhuman uncreation in Pope’s poem offers a model for the turn from the many to the momentous in the poetry of the Lisbon earthquake.

Chapter 5 encounters the vast impossibility of the human representation of climate to discover an ongoing crossfire between human authority and unpredictable other-than-human vitality. Chapter 5, “Storms and Torrents: Swift’s ‘A City Shower’ and Defoe’s The Storm,” describes the impact of innumerability and impossibility in both of these distinctive texts. Though the representation of climate is conventionally framed around its impact on human “nature,” the “City Shower” and The Storm project the experience of weather through forms of confluence and turbulence that move all things and beings indiscriminately, reflecting an agency beyond any human certainty.

This chaotic turbulence and unconventional loving, this irresistible succession of materialities, this sudden turn to a momentous immediacy, and then this creation of an inexpressible, unknowable new world, which these accounts of the other-than-human track across eighteenth-century literary history, taken together offer a view of a diverse and powerful counterhuman imaginary, embedded inextricably in human creativity and emerging necessarily through human discourse and yet projecting an autonomy, agency, force, or even an independence from or repudiation of the human. This is the new paradox that The Counterhuman Imaginary presents as a basis for the human critique of the other-than-human. And, paradoxically, the account of the experience of the counterhuman here opens new opportunities to discover manifestations of innovation in human literary culture—innovations that reflect the counterintuitive presence of force, succession, chaos, impossibility, turbulence, and the unknowable, beyond the realm of the human. Human creative innovation arises from the intrusion of the other-than-human and from the impact on human creativity of a realm beyond human accountability and even human understanding.

1. 1. Marion W. Copeland, “Literary Animal Studies in 2012: Where We Are, Where We Are Going,” Anthrozoös 25, supp. 1 (2012): s98.

2. 2. Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 13, 305.

3. 3. Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 1. Keenelyside turns to the relevance of “actual animal lives” later in her Introduction (10). For other recent approaches to literary animals in the eighteenth century, see Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures; Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Ingrid Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015); Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Frank Palmeri, ed., Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006); and Louse E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

4. 4. Erin Drew, The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021), 4. For other recent studies of climate, ecology, and nature in the period, see Tobias Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Adeline Johns-Putra, Climate and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, eds., Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds., Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Air, Water, and Fire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1672–1831 (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000).

5. 5. Drew, Usufructuary Ethos, 5–6.

6. 6. Leerom Medovoi, “The Biopolitical Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist Literary Theory,” in Literary Materialisms, ed. Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 85–86.

7. 7. Medovoi, 87.

8. 8. Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds; Edna Duffy, “Modernism under Review: Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981),” Modernist Cultures 11 (2016): 143–160.

9. 9. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xiii–ix.

10. 10. Richard Grusin, introduction to The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), viii.

11. 11. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, “Introduction: A ‘New Tradition’ in Thought,” in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, ed. Dolphijn and van der Tuin (Ann Arbor: UM Publishing, University of Michigan Library, Open Humanities Press, 2012), 91.

12. 12. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Coole and Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 21.

13. 13. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1969), trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2013).

14. 14. John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 36.

15. 15. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Karen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 145 (originally published as L’institution imaginaire de la société, 1975).

16. 16. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, 36.

17. 17. Aleksondra Hultquist in her overview account of the “affective turn” usefully differentiates between the “history of emotion” and “affect theory”: “Scholars asking history of emotion questions are interested in the cultural, psychological, and historical contingencies of how we feel what we feel”; while for affect theorists, affects are “prepersonal,” “precognitive,” “highlighting difference, process, and force” (citing Brian Massumi, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, and Margaret Wetherall). Hultquist, “Introductory Essay: Emotion, Affect, and the Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century 58 (2017): 274.

18. 18. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 94.

19. 19. Massumi, 50, 94.

20. 20. Stephen Ahern, “Nothing More Than Feelings? Affect Theory Reads the Age of Sensibility,” The Eighteenth Century 58 (2017): 286, 287–88. For other relevant studies and statements on affect theory, see Sara Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014); Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 434–72; William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in Gregg and Seigworth, Affect Theory Reader, 1–25; Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

21. 21. Lynn Festa, Fiction without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 1, 2. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text. For recent studies relevant to objects and “things” in eighteenth-century studies, see Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Richardson to Hobbes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects and Material Subjects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Lives of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); and Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

22. 22. Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 23.

23. 23. Brown, 39, 18, 28, 39, and 32. In these contexts, Brown variously cites Heidegger from What Is a Thing? and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” See Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 7; and Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial, 2001), 31, 67.

24. 24. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, introduction to Critique and Postcritique, ed. Anker and Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 3, 8.

25. 25. Anker and Felski, 16, 20.

26. 26. Anker and Felski cite, as now-classic examples, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 (2009): 1–21; Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; and Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 371–91.

27. 27. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 349–50.

28. 28. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 1–2. Recent explications of the “posthuman” include theoretical, ontological, and cultural scenarios. On ontology, see Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003). On the literary representation of sympathy for or identification with animals, see John Morillo, The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature between Descartes and Darwin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2018). For perspectives highlighting deconstruction, see Stefan Herbrechter’s account of “critical posthumanism … as a continuation of … [the] deconstruction of the subject,” in Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 197; originally Posthumanismus: Eine knitishe Einfuhrung (2009). And see Cary Wolfe’s focus on posthumanism as a response to the “deeply problematic” construction of the humanist subject “especially within ‘linguacentric’ disciplines such as cultural criticism … [making] even the possibility of subjectivity coterminous with the species barrier,” in “The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and Varela,” Cultural Critique 30 (1995): 35; and also Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

29. 29. For a conceptual account of the current terms and concepts relevant to “posthumanism,” see Francesca Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations,” Existenz 8 (2013): 26–32. I am indebted to Peter J. Katzenstein’s account of the posthuman and especially the transhuman, notably in his recent “Worldviews and World Politics,” in Uncertainty and Its Discontents: Worldviews in World Politics, ed. Katzenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 1–69.

30. 30. Braidotti, Posthuman, 2–3.

31. 31. Ferrando, “Posthumanism,” 29.

32. 32. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 4–11.

33. 33. Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Energy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 1.

34. 34. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 4.6.

35. 35. Pope, 3.240.