Antoine Traisnel,Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition, Minnesota University Press, 2020

University of Minnesota Press | 368 pages | September 2020
ISBN 978-1-5179-0964-2 | paper | $27.00

ISBN 978-1-5179-0963-5 | cloth | $108.00

Reading canonical works of the nineteenth century through the modern transformation of human-animal relations

Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon. Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century.

From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from…