Description: From the bestiality trials of the seventeenth-century Plymouth Plantation to the emergence of sentimental pet culture in the nineteenth, Boggs traces a history of human-animal sexuality in America, one shaped by sexualized animal bodies and affective pet relations.
Review Quotes: This is a book about Fido and Derrida, about Sparky and Levinas, about animals and major twentieth-century (and now twenty-first century) theorists of subjectivity such as Lacan, Agamben, and Foucault. Such unexpectedness and daring supplies a refreshing tonic not only for American literary criticism but also for other intellectual endeavors such as philosophy, ethics, and psychoanalysis indebted to species logic. Boggs shows how productive the interdisciplinary work of animal studies is, and it is a task she accomplishes with grace and perspicacity.--Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison