In his study of the presence of animals in early nineteenth-century works by Charles and Mary Lamb, John Clare, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, Chase Pielak observes that images of dead and deadly animals coincided with questions about what constitutes human life and its boundaries. He argues that each author uses language that ultimately betrays itself to expose beastly disruptions that not only startle the authors themselves but serve as landmarks within Romantic literature.