Meat markets: the cultural history of bloody London

Abjective ecologies of British humans, animals, and other nonhumans in cultural forms of nineteenth-century literature, from Dracula to Bovril

Meat Markets articulates the emergent ‘nonhuman thought’ developed across literatures of the long nineteenth century and inflecting recent critical theories of abject life and animality. It presents important connections between meat and popular serial press industries, the intersections of criminals and public readership, and the long history of bloody spectacle at London’s Smithfield Market including public executions, criminal escapades, death and horror tales, and the fungible ‘penny press’ forms of mass consumption. Through analysis of subjection, address, and narration in canonical and penny literatures, this book reveals the mutual forces of concern and consumption that afflict objects of a weird cultural history of bloody London across the long nineteenth century. Players include butchers, Smithfield, Parliament, Dickens, Romantics, Sweeney Todd, cattle, and a strange, impossible London.
Key Features Articulates the emergent ‘nonhuman thought’ developed across literatures of the long nineteenth century and inflecting recent critical theories of abject life and animality Shows the productive contradictions in social and animal concern as it produces anonymous, ‘biopolitical’ objects in literature, food culture, and London society Presents important connections between meat and popular serial press industries, the intersections of criminals and public readership, and the long history of bloody spectacle at London’s Smithfield Market including public executions, criminal escapades, death and horror tales, and the fungible ‘penny press’ forms of mass consumption