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.

This study charts aspects of the significance of animals for Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, and relates their interest in animals to discourses about animals produced in various contemporary cultural contexts.

'An indispensable work of scholarship on the cultural, political, scientific, social, and literary responses to the animal in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Byronists will discover that the noble lord had many things to say on this subject. A pleasure to read.' Charles E. Robinson, Professor of English, University of Delaware; Executive Director, The Byron Society of America 'Christine Kenyon-Jones has found a genuinely new area of interest within the much-studied field of early nineteenth-century English poetry. This elegantly written study intersects in all sorts of interesting ways with other recent work -- on Romanticism and ecology, on questions of gender and the body, nature and nurture, and so forth -- whilst continuously maintaining its distinctiveness of voice and focus. Throughout the book, and especially when attention is fixed on Lord Byron, fascinating material is discussed in a lively and informed manner.' Jonathan Bate, Leverhulme Research Professor & King Alfred Professor, University of Liverpool '... makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Romantic period.' European Romantic Review