Author Archives: Lynn Festa

About Lynn Festa

Associate professor of English at Rutgers University. She previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (2006) and many articles, including recently ‘‘Person, Animal, Thing: The 1796 Dog Tax and the Right to Superfluous Things,’’ Eighteenth-Century Life 33, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 1–44.

Humanity without Feathers

June 12, 2014 by
One comment
The title of this essay is not simply an echo of Woody Allen’s neurotic reversal of Emily Dickinson’s ‘‘Hope is the thing with Feathers’’; it alludes, of course, to the venerable enumerative definition, as old as Plato, of man as a ‘‘featherless biped capable of speech and reason.’’