"This work places the modern period (post-1700) at the center of the scholarship on horses as they relate to humans, showing how the horse has remained central to the accelerating culture of modernity. The contributors investigate specific equine cultures--from the performance of social power and the definition of heritage in Europe, Australia, and the Americas, to explorations of the ways horses figure in distinctively modern genres of the self, such as autobiography, biography, and photographic portraiture."--Supplied by publisher.

Introduction /Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld -- Science and technology. Machines of feeling: bits and interspecies communication in the eighteenth century / Monica Mattfeld -- Horses at Waterloo, 1815 / Donna Landry -- The agency and the matter of the dead horse in the Victorian novel / Sinan Akilli -- The aura of dignity: on connection and trust in the photographs of Charlotte Dumas / Rune Gade -- Commodification and consumption. Stabilizing politics: the stables of Weissenstein Castle in Pommersfelden (1717-21) / -- Magdalena Bayreuther and Christine Rüppell -- Trading horses in the eighteenth century: Rhode Island and the Atlantic world / Charlotte Carrington-Farmer -- Narratives of race and racehorses in the art of Edward Troye / Jessica Dallow -- "More than a horse": the cultural work of racehorse biography / Kristen Guest -- National identity. The politics of reproduction: horse breeding and state studs in prussia, 1750-1900 / Tatsuya Mitsuda -- Horsemeat is certainly delicious": anxiety, xenophobia, and rationalism at a nineteenth-century American hippophagic banquet / Susanna Forrest -- Circus studs and equestrian sports in turn-of-the-century France / Kari Weil -- Heritage icon or environmental pest? Brumbies in the Australian cultural imaginary / Isa Menzies.