A electronic conversation aimed at confronting "speciesism," and constructing what Cary Wolfe calls a "posthumanist theory of the subject."

The Introduction to the Special Issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation titled "Animal, All Too Animal" appears at a time when debates about human reason, language, and consciousness central to postructuralist theories of the nineties are beginning to be supplemented by—and even confronted with—a recognition that humans always existed among nonhuman creatures. As this introduction describes, "Animal, All Too Animal" explores the Englightenment's rearticulation of enw and more intimate relationships with nonhumans; this history is not only populated by men of reason and women of feeling, but by the birds, dogs, apes, and horses with whom humans of different genders, ethnicities, and classes enjoyed—or suffered—increasing intimacies, and distances.

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This essay offers an overview of important historical and theoretical issues in animal studies scholarship on the long eighteenth century, 1660–1750. It draws connections among the theological, social, and ontological debates of the early modern period and discusses how these debates helped to shape current questions in posthumanist and animal studies research. Recent works in animal studies about the eighteenth century explore anthropocentrism and the human–animal divide; sensibility and anti‐cruelty legislation; thing theory and personhood; and literary subjectivity in the broader context of more‐than‐human ecologies.