Imperfect Creatures Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 / Lucinda Cole.
Material type:
TextPublisher: University of Michigan Press, Manufacturer: Project MUSE, Description: 1 online resource (vi, 240 pages) : illustrationsISBN: 9780472121557; 0472121553Subject(s): LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance | NATURE / Animals / General | Literature and science -- England -- History -- 17th century | Animals as carriers of disease | Human-animal relationships | Human-animal relationships in literature | Pests in literature | English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism | English literature -- 17th century -- History and criticismGenre/Form: Electronic books. DDC classification: 820.9/36 LOC classification: PR438.P48 | C86 2016Online resources: Full text available: | Item type | Current library | Call number | URL | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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eBook
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Digital Library
Resources in this library are accessible in digital format e.g. eBooks or eJournals accessible online. |
PR438.P48 C86 2016 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Link to resource | Available |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-232) and index.
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.
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"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.
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