English

Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) oxidation was studied using copper or the water-soluble initiator azobis(2-amidinopropane) dihydrochloride (ABAP) to catalyze the reaction. These studies were carried out with purified, native LDLs that had a well-defined composition and which contained different concentrations of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) and alpha-tocopherol. The LDL was obtained from nonhuman primates fed diets enriched in cholesterol and one of four types of fatty acids: saturated (Sat), monounsaturated (Mono), omega-6 (omega-6FA), or omega-3 (omega-3FA) fatty acids. The PUFA concentration of the LDLs depended upon the diet and had the following order: omega-6FA > Sat approximately Mono approximately omega-3FA. Linoleic acid was the predominant PUFA in all of the LDLs. The rates of oxidation were linearly dependent upon the concentration of PUFA. When ABAP was used to initiate oxidation the lag time was linearly related to the amount of alpha-tocopherol. However, with copper catalysis no linear correlation was evident. If the different enrichments were analyzed independently, it was found that copper-catalyzed oxidation of LDLs enriched with omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids showed a linear correlation between the lag time and the amount of alpha-tocopherol but that LDLs enriched with Sat or Mono fatty acids did not show a correlation. These results demonstrate that the rate of oxidation is dependent upon PUFA concentration and that the ability of alpha-tocopherol to inhibit oxidation depends upon the lipid environment and the mode of initiation.

Analyzing Romantic conservative critiques of modernity found in literature, philosophy, natural history, and agricultural periodicals, this book finds a common theme in the 'intergenerational imagination.' The conservative intergenerational imagination cultivates a counter-narrative to the optimistic telos of progress and the punctual, liberal individual by contending that current generations receive land and culture as a gift from previous generations, and that the current generation bears the responsibility to preserve that gift for future generations. First locating the intergenerational imagination in Burke's Reflections and Wordsworth's epitaphic poetry, which chronicle the consequences of modernity and plead for intergenerational continuity in land use, the book then explores regionalist texts of the Romantic period, including Thomas Bewick's natural histories, Maria Edgeworth's Irish tales, William Cobbett's agricultural periodicals, and John Clare's poetry.

PART I: IMAGINATION
Introduction: Conservatism and the Intergenerational Imagination
1. Intergenerational Imagination in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
2. 'Their graves are green': Conservation in William Wordsworth's Epitaphic Ballads
PART II: HABITATION
3. The Politics of the Miniature in Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds
4. Conservation or Catastrophe: Reflexive Regionalism in Maria Edgeworth's Irish Tales
5. Subsistence as Resistance: William Cobbett's Food Politics
6. Anthropomorphism and the Critique of Liberal Rights in John Clare's Enclosure Elegies
Epilogue

William Cobbett’s _History of the Protestant “Reformation”_ theorizes and historicizes medieval monasteries as an institutional model of common, shared property and resources. The monastic practice of hospitality facilitated acts of commoning that redistributed wealth across local communities and created a habitus of common rights access to property. At the same time, the monastic rule of celibacy served as a preventative check on those who would be born into the upper class, and thus transferred the burden for limiting population to those who consumed the most resources. The rule of celibacy further queers conservative Burkean intergenerational inheritance by placing it within communal, homosocial groups instead of families. Cobbett’s depiction of the monastic rule of hospitality toward the lower class and rule of celibacy for the monks and nuns challenges the naturalization of private property in Malthus’s _Essay on Population_. As opposed to Smith’s invisible hand of the market or Malthus’s biopolitical, punishing hand of nature, Cobbett points to the visible and hospitable hand of the monasteries in checking over-consumption and facilitating the distribution of community resources.

John Clare’s middle-period poetry documents the expropriation of the commons and curtailment of common right in the early nineteenth century. While enclosure closed off the commons, it did not fully extinguish the practice of common right; enclosure encouraged in Clare’s poetry a re-imagination of the commons that continues to advance claims of common right. Crucially, for Clare, the work of commoning is not undertaken by humans alone, but also by cooperating with the “silent work” of non-human animals, plants, and natural processes. In Clare’s poetry, evidence of the silent work of non-human life—bird nests, rabbit tracks, and molehills—mark the improved landscape. The work of moles in particular, I argue, points to wider debates about the status of labor and private property. The second part of the essay, “Celebrating Mole-Work,” examines Clare’s sonnet “The Mole,” which describes the animal as a “rich architect” marking a territory that is different from, yet still exists within privatized, agricultural space. Landowners despise the subterranean work of the mole. Thus the following section, “Disposable Life: Moles and Mole-Catchers,” takes up poems Clare wrote about the occupation of the mole-catcher, whose work both counters and mirrors that of the mole. The moles and mole-catchers are both forms of disposable life under agricultural capitalism, while at the same time they surreptitiously engage in new commoning practices on private property. The last section, “Resilient Molehills,” returns to the ubiquitous molehills that mark forty-five of Clare’s middle period poems in order to argue that Clare’s molehills mark a topography of animal territory that undermines private property. In this way, mole-work aligns with Clare’s poetic work in imagining a politics of animal commoning in the wake of the extinction of traditional forms of common right. Forthcoming in _Studies in Romanticism_.

Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012) depicts the “story of a female grizzly bear monitored by wildlife conservation officers from 2001–2009” in Banff National Park. The film’s visuals are composed of fragments from critter-cam footage, which alternate with a minimalist interface: a grid populated with dots signifying other animals and plants living in Banff. This essay argues that Bear 71 uses two strategies to reframe the data-driven discourse of wildlife management. First, the anthropomorphized narrative of Bear 71 reframes wildlife management data through attentiveness to the experience of a single grizzly bear, which functions as a counterdiscourse to the dominant framing of wildlife data as aggregate information about a species population. Second, the visual strategy of the minimalist interface prompts the viewer/user to navigate within a multispecies grid that gestures toward understanding animal endangerment as a problem not on the level of species but rather within a diverse multispecies assemblage that, crucially, includes humans. Although the eponymous Bear 71 dies, the narrative refuses closure because her daughter and other animals continue to move across the interface after the narrative ends. Bear 71 offers a model of “becoming-with” endangered animals through our attunement to both their singular stories and multispecies assemblages. It further models how the environmental humanities can be employed to rearticulate scientific data as innovative multispecies stories.

This chapter discusses William Cobbett’s relationship to the Peterloo Massacre. First, it examines Cobbett’s ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ (1816), a cheap, mass-produced pamphlet that provoked working-class discontent before Peterloo. Second, the chapter analyzes Cobbett’s reaction to the Peterloo Massacre while he was self-exiled in America. Cobbett exhumed Thomas Paine’s body and then brought it back to England in order to establish a memorial for a ‘noble’ of the working-class. The chapter argues that Cobbett believed that Peterloo occurred because of the rhetorical rendering of the poor as an animalized ‘surplus population,’ and both ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ and his post-Peterloo project for Paine’s memorial sought to the counter the marginalization of the working class by insisting that they were connected to intergenerational traditions and monuments beyond their animal bodies.

Depictions of human labour in John Clare’s middle-period poetry suggest that the ‘silent work’ of the natural world both resists and assists the more easily observed human projects of agriculture and enclosure. In Clare’s poetry, careful observation reveals working assemblages of humans and non-humans engaged in a relational process. Clare’s depictions of multispecies work revise the Georgic mode, in which a heroic human subdues the earth in order to make it productive for humans. It also undermines the Lockean view of work as appropriation, a perspective that renders the work of labouring-class humans and non-humans invisible. Clare’s ‘birds nesting’ poems in particular explore how humans can begin to recognize animals’ work, which asserts its own temporalities and claims to space within private property. In these poems, birds and other wild animals emerge as a fugitive commons that endures even after the enclosure of common land. Clare’s poetic multispecies working assemblages, however, do not suggest quaint pastoral harmony, but rather acknowledge occasional violence and even oppression, while at the same time intimating that work can aspire towards creating multispecies refugia that allow some degree of mutual thriving.

Robert Wedderburn’s London-based periodical, Axe Laid to the Root (1817), disseminates his vision for a transatlantic alliance between the radicals of England’s lower classes and enslaved people in the West Indies. Throughout the Axe’s six issues, he challenges the abolitionist narrative that liberal, individualist freedoms should be spread from England to the West Indies. Instead, Wedderburn instructs his white, lower-class readers in London about already existing African Jamaican practices of insurrectionary land and food reclamation. First, he champions the provision grounds as a land commons that produces food sovereignty and communal identity. Second, he represents the Jamaican Maroons’ local ecological knowledge a source of resistance to plantation economies. Using Sylvia Wynter’s environmental theories of resistance, this essay argues Wedderburn’s political theories champion African Jamaican land and food commons as a model for abolitionist futures.

In Natural Mysticism: Toward a New Reggae Aesthetic (1999), Kwame Dawes coined the term "reggae aesthetic" to explain the paradigm shift in 1960s-70s Caribbean literature that also dovetailed the rise of reggae music in Jamaica. By exploring the impact of popular music on the social developments in late 1960s and early 1970s Jamaica, Dawes offered a new method of Caribbean literary analysis reminiscent of the extant blues tradition in African American literature--similar to the way that reggae music borrows from the blues--and in so doing, highlighted the artistic and cultural influences that link people of color across the "Black Atlantic." This dissertation builds on Dawes's theory by exploring the history and function of music as an aesthetic form and narrative trope in literature of the Black Atlantic. Blues and reggae in contemporary fiction manifest the oral tradition in African storytelling. A comparative study on reggae and blues aesthetics in literat...