TY - BOOK AU - Cole,Lucinda ED - Project Muse. TI - Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 SN - 9780472121557 AV - PR438.P48 C86 2016 U1 - 820.9/36 23 PB - University of Michigan Press KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance KW - bisacsh KW - NATURE / Animals / General KW - Literature and science KW - England KW - History KW - 17th century KW - Animals as carriers of disease KW - Human-animal relationships KW - Human-animal relationships in literature KW - Pests in literature KW - English literature KW - 18th century KW - History and criticism KW - Electronic books. KW - local N1 - 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; Open Access N2 - "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. "-- UR - https://muse.jhu.edu/book/52100/ ER -