Hogarth’s Beef

• In Event: Visual Approaches in Green Criminology

Abstract

Scholars of art history, literary criticism and animal studies have paid considerable attention of late to how visual representations of animals have frequently and sometimes to great effect been deployed in the imagination of national identity. Though the broad backcloth of this paper is woven from the engagement of these several disciplines with such images, its concern is limited to those that couple nationalism with carnivorism. This¬ couplet has not yet been explored in sufficient detail or depth. My particular focus here and my sole instantiation of this couplet is how the irascible English artist William Hogarth (1697-1764) deployed images of animals’ edible flesh—of “beef,” especially—in order to nourish a nascent national identity in eighteenth-century Britain.

Author

• Piers Beirne, University of Southern Maine