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

Published Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2016]

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Description 1 online resource (240 pages) Contents Introduction: Reading beneath the Grain -- Rats, Witches, Miasma, and Early Modern Theories of Contagion -- Swarming Things: Dearth and the Plagues of Egypt in Wither and Cowley -- "Observe the Frog": Imperfect Creatures, Neuroanatomy, and the Problem of the Human -- Libertine Biopolitics: Dogs, Bitches, and Parasites in Shadwell, Rochester, and Gay -- What Happened to the Rats? Hoarding, Hunger, and Storage on Crusoe's Island -- Afterword: We Have Never Been Perfect Summary "Lucinda 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, 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, 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."-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-232) and index Notes English Print version record Subject English literature -- 17th century -- History and criticism English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism Pests in literature. Human-animal relationships in literature. Human-animal relationships. Animals as carriers of disease. Literature and science -- England -- History -- 17th century English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism NATURE -- Animals -- General. LITERARY CRITICISM -- Renaissance. Human-animal relationships in literature Human-animal relationships English literature Animals as carriers of disease Literature and science Pests in literature Science in literature England Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book LC no. 2020707064 ISBN 9780472121557 0472121553 9780472900633 0472900633

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