In writing this book, I was fortunate to have tremendously insightful and generous interlocutors to engage with my work: Neel Ahuja, Sandy Alexandre, Anthony Bogues, Hamilton Carroll, Russ Castronovo, Marianne DeKoven, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Donatella Izzo, Lindgren Johnson, Cindy Katz, Eric Lott, Michael Lundblad, Laurie Shannon, Ramón Soto-Crespo, John Stauffer, Jordan Stein, Eleonora Stoppino, Rei Terada, Cary Wolfe, and Elizabeth Young made my thinking sharper. I owe a particular debt to Bill Brown, Tim Dean, and Peter Travis. At Dartmouth, I have generous colleagues: Amy Allen, Lisa Baldez, Aimee Bahng, Michael Blumenauer, Leslie Butler, Michael Chaney, Mary Coffey, Soyica Colbert, Kate Conley, Jonathan Crewe, Mona Domosh, George Edmondson, Marty Favor, Veronika Füchtner, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Gretchen Gerzina, Lenore Grenoble, Christopher MacEvitt, Annabel Martin, Andrew McCann, Patricia McKee, Klaus Milich, Klaus Mladek, Monika Otter, Kristin O’Rourke, Donald Eugene Pease, Adrian Randolph, Ivy Schweitzer, George Trumbull, Barbara Will, and Melissa Zeiger—thank you! I am grateful to Darsie Riccio and Isabel Weatherdon for their significant contributions to the ease and efficiency with which I could work.
The Summer Institute for American Studies has been vital to bringing this book into existence: that’s where ideas became talks and talks became chapters. I thank Don Pease for bringing this amazing intellectual environment into existence year after year and for inviting me to participate. To him, the codirectors, plenary speakers, and especially my seminar participants, thank you for holding me to high standards, offering constructive criticism, and giving me the opportunity to think about my work in dialogue with your scholarship. Thanks also to audiences at Brown’s Pembroke Center, the Modern Language Association convention, and the American Studies Association conventions for their feedback on earlier versions.
The American Philosophical Society funded my work with a year-long sabbatical fellowship, and Dartmouth College gave me leave from teaching during the tenure of this award. This time to research, write, and think was and is much appreciated. At Dartmouth College, I held a faculty fellowship through the Leslie Humanities Center in 2007–2008, and a Curtis Welling Fellowship in 2008–2009 supported my research.
The Leslie Humanities Center—which I now direct—funded a manuscript review: Amy Allen, Jonathan Crewe, Marianne DeKoven, Andrew McCann, Don Pease, Adrian Randolph, Ivy Schweitzer, and Cary Wolfe read the manuscript in its entirety and provided insightful feedback that made it a better book. The Leslie Center’s Humanities Institute on “States of Emergency” that Klaus Mladek and George Edmondson codirected in 2009 crucially enhanced my thinking about biopolitics, and I am grateful to the co-organizers as well as to the participants and presenters for their rigorous intellectual contributions to my work.
Many thanks to Wendy Lochner, Christine Mortlock, Christine Dunbar, Anne McCoy, Kathryn Jorge, and Noah Arlow at Columbia University Press, the probing readers whose reports offered crucial guidance for the final stages of revision, and copyeditor Annie Barva.
Thanks to Marylène Altieri and Sarah Hutcheon at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe; to Paul Erickson at the American Antiquarian Society; as well as to Hazen Allen, Susan Bibeau, Laura Braunstein, Bill Fontaine, Jay Satterfield (who first said to me, “Millie”), and Susan Simon for library and computing support at Dartmouth. Thanks to my brother, Sean Reed Boggs, for helping with some of the images. Thanks also to my research assistants, Andrea Olinger and Aurora Wells, as well as to the students in my course “Of Nags, Bitches, and Shrews: Women and Animals in Western Literature.”
I am grateful to John Stauffer for his generosity in sharing with me his transcription of Frederick Douglass’s “Pictures” lecture and for helping me locate Douglass’s description of his encounter with the dog in his speech “Farewell to the British People.”
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “American Bestiality: Sex, Animals, and the Construction of Subjectivity,” Cultural Critique 76, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 98–125, Copyright © 2010 Regents of the University of Minnesota. Chapter 4 has appeared in two previous versions. It is adapted from my essay “Emily Dickinson’s Animal Pedagogies,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (March 2009): 533–541, and is reprinted here by permission of the copyright holder, the Modern Language Association of America. It was also published as “Animals and the Formation of Liberal Subjectivity in Nineteenth- Century American Literature,” in Russ Castronovo, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 197–216 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Citations from Emily Dickinson’s poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Citations from Emily Dickinson’s letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers of The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), Copyright © 1958, 1987 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson. The image reproductions from Frederick Douglass’s work appear courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library. I thank the American Antiquarian Society for the picture of Carlo. The photo of Barbara Bush and her dog Millie from the cover of Life magazine appears here courtesy of the photographer, William Wegman; LIFE® is a registered trademark and used here by permission of The Picture Collection, Inc. Thanks to all these presses, institutions, and people for giving permission for this work to appear here.
While I wrote this book, my children were in excellent hands at the Dartmouth College Child Care Center: thanks to Terri Crane, Denise Ayers, Lori-Jane Higgins, Susan Quimby, Jennifer Boudro, Teresa Hahn, Terri Hollis, Bobbie-Lynn Stone, Ray Garcia, Tatyana Bills, Raquel Fluette, Karen Gray, Kristin Cole, Sunnie McPhedres, Jeffrey Robbins, Amy Potter, Terry Chase, and many others for their support of my work and my family.
Personal friends sustain me: Fina Cañas Barouch, Cathy Boies, Martha Bohrer, Silke Deitmar, Pat Murray, thank you and Danke!
A number of real and imaginary animals accompanied me in the process of thinking and writing. Our cats, Kaya and Peevish, are highly anthropomorphized, and—thank goodness!—highly resistant to that anthropomorphism. They continue to teach me about alterity. The link between children and animals that I draw here goes back much further, however, to my childhood dog, Watson (1979–1995). In his own inimitable way, he remains my Carlo.
My greatest debt goes to my family: Brian, Noah and Liam, my mother as well as my father, the memory of my grandmother, Annemarie Klemme. Sean Reed Boggs is the best brother I could have.