Imperfect creatures : vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740 / Lucinda Cole.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cole, Lucinda, author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

Animals in literature.

Insects in literature.

Literature and science--History--17th century.

Literature and science.

Literature and science--History--18th century.

History.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (VI, 240 pages) : illustrations

Other Title:

Vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2016.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Luanda Cole's Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of "vermin" as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole's argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts-William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley's The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester's "A Ramble in St. James's Park," and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year-alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy. As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems-notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine-were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind's claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole's study indicates, so-called "vermin" occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease-even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind's relationship to an unpredictable, irrational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic-humans, animals, and even thoughts. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion 24

Chapter 2 Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley 49

Chapter 3 "Observe the Frog": Imperfect Creatures, Neuroanatomy, and the Problem of the Human 81

Chapter 4 Libertine Biopolitics: Dogs, Bitches, and Parasites in Shadwell, Rochester, and Gay 111

Chapter 5 What Happened to the Rats? Hoarding, Hunger, and Storage on Crusoe's Island 143.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-232) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

0472072951

0472052950

9780472121557

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access