Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; List of Abbreviations; 1 Introduction: Tracing the History of the Criminal-Animal Metaphor; Part I: Creating 'Criminal Beasts' in Early Modern Literature and Law; 2 Catching Conies with Thomas Harman, Robert Greene, and Thomas Dekker; 3 Richard III's Animalistic Criminal Body; 4 Of a Howling Murderer -- The Duke of Malfi; 5 Ben Jonson's Comedies of Gulling Rogues; Part II: Humanizing Animals and 'Animalizing' the Lower Orders during the Long Eighteenth Century; Introduction to Part II: Eighteenth-Century Changes in the Criminal-Animal Trope
6 Colonialism and the 'Criminal Beast' in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels7 William Hogarth's The Four Stages of Cruelty -- Sympathizing with Animals and Denigrating the Lower Orders as Beasts; 8 The Prisoner as Suffering Animal -- Caleb Williams's Revision of the Criminal-Animal Metaphor; Part III: Reinstating the 'Criminal Beast' during the Nineteenth Century; Introduction to Part III: The Nineteenth Century's Delineation of the Criminal Class; 9 Charles Dickens's Contradictions; 10 The Criminal-Animal Metaphor and Lombrosian Criminology; 11 Coda; Bibliography; Index
Criminals as Animals demonstrates how animal metaphors have been used to denigrate persons identified as criminal in literature, law, and science. It traces the popularization of the 'criminal beast' metaphor in the late 16th century, the troubling of the trope during the long 18th century, and the later discovery of criminal atavism. It concludes that criminal-animal metaphors influence punitive treatments of prisoners and the poor even today
