Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance. Volume 1 : Insects / edited by Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Botelho, Keith, editor.

Campana, Joseph, editor.

Series:

Animalibus.

Animalibus Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English literature.

Insects in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

University Park, PA : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from early modern England in order to understand how people in that era thought about--and with--insect and arachnid life. Designed for the classroom, the book comprises two volumes--Insects and Concepts--that can be used together or independently. Each addresses the collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early modern natural history and provides new insights into the old question of what it means to be human in a world populated by beasts large and small.Volume 1, Insects, examines how insects burrowed into the literal and symbolic economies of the era. The contributors consider diminutive creatures--such as bees and beetles, flies and fleas, silkworms and spiders--and their depictions in plays, poetry, fables, natural histories, and more. In doing so, they illuminate how early modern science and literature worked as intersecting systems of knowledge production about the natural world and show definitively how insect life was, and remains, intimately entangled with human life.In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume include Chris Barrett, Roya Biggie, Bruce Boehrer, Gary Bouchard, Dan Brayton, Eric Brown, Mary Baine Campbell, Perry Guevara, Shannon Kelley, Emily King, Karen Raber, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Donovan Sherman, and Steven Swarbrick.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction Creatures

1 Silkworm Thomas Moffett, Silkworm Laureate

2 Ants Go to the Pismire

3 Flea Annihilating the Copulative Conceit: John Donne's Conversion of the "son of dust" into Uncertain Sacrilege

4 Fly Of Flyes: The Insect Mind of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

5 Gnat Th e Clamor of Things: Moffett's Gnats, Spenser's Complaints

6 Maggot Mutable Maggots: Corruption, Generation, and Literary Legacy

7 Bee "Some say the bee stings": Toward an Apian Poetics

8 Wasp What Is It Like to Be Like a Wasp?

9 Butterflies and Moths Volatile Creatures and Elaborate Work

10 Grasshopper and Locust Antimonarchal Locusts: Translating the Grasshopper in the Aftermath of the English Civil Wars

11 Beetle Sycorax's Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and Blackness

12 Spider Th e Renaissance of Spiders: Ambivalence, Beauty, Terror, Art

13 Water Bugs Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine Science

14 Worms Worms of Conscience

15 Scorpions Flame of Fire Beaten: Scorpions in and out of Mind

Epilogue Creatures

Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

ISBN:

9780271094595

0271094591

OCLC:

1380735095