This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

This chapter follows a cue from Jacques Lacan in considering the antinomy of nonsense and onomatopoeia. With Edward Lear at its centre, the chapter discusses the violence against the animal and the species melancholy that characterize nonsense writing. Also treated are Christine Rossetti’s Sing-Song and animal poems by Thomas Hardy.

Michel Foucault argued that in the nineteenth century, the species became a population and became subject to political management. Foucault’s claim defines the political stakes of this book, whose point of departure is the loss of a theological ground for the species concept. As species become targets of political power, they become mutable and historically contingent. The book argues that a result is that species come to be identified with aesthetic categories and with symptomatic or unmotivated behaviors.

This chapter defines a genre of lyric whose speaker is a personification of an entire species. Lyrics of this kind appear in poetic field guides in the 1830s, and in poetry for children throughout the century. The chapter closes with readings of lyrics by Swinburne and Hardy in which the conditions under which a species can become a speaking subject are opened to critique

This chapter develops the concerns of Chapter 4 by discussing the relation between Freud’s concept of the symptom and Darwin’s reading of defunctioned and residual structures as evidence of species identity and affinity. Freud’s unconscious emerges in this analysis as emerging from the nineteenth century crisis of the species concept.

This chapter is the first of two on blood as a figure for kinship and species identity in the nineteenth century. It begins with the history of bloodletting and blood transfusion in the period, and documents the emergence in the second half of the century of an imaginary species body, whose individual members are characterized by their propensity to save or waste blood from the common supply. The idea of a collective body sharing a common blood is traced in a series of texts on bloodshed and blushing, including Alfred Tennyson’s “Maud,” William Morris’s “The Defense of Guinevere,” Christina Rossetti’s “The Convent Threshold,” D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny,” and Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

This chapter discusses onomatopoeia as an ancient poetic device for representing bird and animal calls that in the 1830s was repurposed for science by inclusion in field guides as an aid to identifying bird species. The poetic tradition of representing animal utterances by onomatopoeia makes a contrast with another tradition in which animals are endowed with speech. The chapter considers the place of both traditions in British Romanticism and concludes by arguing that the incorporation of animal utterance into poetry is figured by Keats and others as transforming animals into food.

This chapter brings the sensory potentialities of material objects used in Roman ritualized activities into discourse concerning the nature and production of ancient religious knowledge. By combining perspectives derived from lived religion and material religion it is argued that religious agency should be understood as the product of the intertwining of human and more-than-human things within assemblages. Lived experiences of this production of agency, in turn, cause people to feel and consequently think in certain ways, ultimately producing what can be categorized as distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. The chapter uses the example of the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae to argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualized action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours. Exploring the Vestals’ experience of ritualized encounters with material things makes it possible to establish new understandings of the real-world lived experiences and identities of these priestesses, offering significant insights into how individualized forms of religious knowledge could be sustained even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.

This chapter covers the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Sering’s professorship in Bonn, the Althoff System, Bismarck, and Colonialism. It also explores the expulsion of Poles and Jews from eastern Germany in 1885, the involvement of Sering, Schmoller, and Tiedemann in the writing of the memorandum for the creation of the Program of Inner Colonization, and how the program began in 1886. It discusses Sering’s time as a professor in Bonn during 1884 to 1889, and the publication of his book on the North America trip, Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas in Gegenwart und Zukunft. Landwirthschaft, Kolonisation und Verkehrswesen in den Vereinigten Staaten und in Britisch-Nordamerika (The Agricultural Competition of North America in the Present and Future. Agriculture, Colonization, and Transportation in the United States and in British North America) in 1887. Sering became a professor in Berlin in 1889. Inner Colonization during the Caprivi Era is discussede, alongside Hugenberg and Schwerin. In 1893, Sering published The Inner Colonization in Eastern Germany. Max Weber, who was rabidly anti-Polishm, supported Sering. Sering’s second journey to America was in 1890, where he attended the World’s Fair in Chicago. The chapter also covers the Frederick Jackson Turner Frontier Thesis, Hohenlohe, Werner Sombart, and Socialists of the Chair.