Introduction: Representing Animals

Why devote a volume to the representation of animals in the eighteenth century? One answer lies in the doubling of known quadruped species classified at the time, a development that suggested a previously unsuspected richness of the natural world and which fuelled debates about competing taxonomic systems. During the eighteenth century the ‘exotic’ (for example, elephants and rhinoceroses) became more familiar, even as the range of known exotica increased; and domesticated animals became the focus of a more sympathetic artistic gaze, even as the bodies of livestock became the site of genetic manipulations that could be seen as heralding modern agri‐business.