Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740Lucinda 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 alongside other nonliterary primary sources (including under-examined archival materials) from the period, including: William Shakespeare s "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," Christopher Marlowe s "The Jew of Malta," Jonathan Swift s "Gulliver s Travels," Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and "Journal of the Plague Year," Giambattista Della Porta s "Natural Magick," William Harvey s "Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals"; Thomas Willis'"Cerebri Anatome" and "Of the Soul of Brutes," and Robert Boyle s "Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv d Notion of Nature." 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, even 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, a-rational 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. " |
Contents
Reading beneath the Grain | 1 |
Chapter 1 Rats Witches Miasma and Early Modern Theories of Contagion | 24 |
Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley | 49 |
Imperfect Creatures Neuroanatomy and the Problem of the Human | 81 |
Dogs Bitches and Parasites in Shadwell Rochester and Gay | 111 |
Hoarding Hunger and Storage on Crusoes Island | 143 |
Other editions - View all
Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 Lucinda Cole Limited preview - 2016 |
Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 Lucinda Cole Limited preview - 2016 |
Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 Lucinda Cole No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Abraham Cowley actants agricultural Anatome animal spirits argues Beasts Bees behavior biopolitics blood body brain Cambridge University Press canine Cartesian cats Chicago colony Corinna corporeal soul corruption Cowley’s Crusoe’s island Culture Daniel Defoe describes discourse disease dogs Early Modern England earth ecological Eighteenth Century English famine Farther Adventures feeding female flea frogs George Wither God’s grain History hive human imagined imperfect creatures insects James John kind Latour libertine Literary Literature Little Ice Age locusts London Mandeville mice Michel Serres moral natural philosophy Oxford parasites perfect pestilence plagues of Egypt poem political Printed putrefaction Raber rats relationship Robert Robinson Crusoe Rochester Rochester's rodents role satire Serres seventeenth century sexual Shadwell Shadwell’s Shakespeare Sir Nicholas social Society species spiders Studies Swarming Things theological Thomas Thomas Shadwell Thomas Willis Timon tion trans turn vermin Virtuoso William Willis Willis’s witchcraft witches Wither worms writes York