The Giant Squid in Transatlantic Culture

Auteur

Otto Latva is a historian focusing on human-animal and human-plant studies as well as environmental history. He has studied widely the early modern as well as the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century societies and cultures. In his previous studies, Latva has especially investigated the shared history of humans and animals and the long-term understanding of the marine environment. He is currently working as a university lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. He also leads a research project Disappeared, Endangered and Newly Arrived Species: The Human Relationship with the Changing Biodiversity of the Baltic Sea (HumBio), funded by the Academy of Finland.

Texte du rabat

Drawing on a range of sources, this book explores the historical relationship between sea animals and humans, demonstrating that far from being an age-old fear with its origins among seafarers, the conception of the giant squid as deep-sea monster evolved as a product of Enlightenment thinking in the work of zoologists and popular writers.

Contenu

List of figures

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Humans, Cephalopods, and History

Part I: The Era of New Ideas and Far-Reaching Seafaring, 17631802

1. The Late Eighteenth-Century Encounters with Giant-Sized Squid

2. Narratives and Enlightenment Theories

Part II: The Years of Uncertainty and Discovery, 180261

3. The Early Nineteenth-Century Encounters with Giant-sized Squid

4. The Enormous Squid, Zoology, and the Public Discussion

Part III: The Period of Cephalopod Monsters, 186199

5. The Late Nineteenth-Century Encounters with Giant-sized Squid

6. The Enormous Squid in Scientific and Public Discussion in the 1860s

7. The Emergence of the Giant Squid and how it Became a Monster

Conclusion

Index