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

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

Creator
Author
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. "--
Language
eng
Work
Publication
Extent
vi, 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
Isbn
9780472052950
Instance
Label
Imperfect creatures : vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740
Title
Imperfect creatures
Title remainder
vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740
Statement of responsibility
Lucinda Cole
Creator
Author
Subject
Language
eng
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. "--
Assigning source
Provided by publisher
Cataloging source
DLC
http://library.link/vocab/creatorName
Cole, Lucinda
Dewey number
820.9/36
Government publication
government publication of a state province territory dependency etc
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
index present
LC call number
PR438.P48
LC item number
C86 2016
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography
http://library.link/vocab/subjectName
  • English literature
  • English literature
  • Pests in literature
  • Human-animal relationships in literature
  • Human-animal relationships
  • Animals as carriers of disease
  • Literature and science
  • NATURE / Animals / General
  • LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance
Label
Imperfect creatures : vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740, Lucinda Cole
Instantiates
Publication
Bibliography note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Carrier category
volume
Carrier category code
  • nc
Carrier MARC source
rdacarrier
Content category
text
Content type code
  • txt
Content type MARC source
rdacontent
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
Control code
930825169
Dimensions
24 cm
Extent
vi, 240 pages
Isbn
9780472052950
Lccn
2015041734
Media category
unmediated
Media MARC source
rdamedia
Media type code
  • n
System control number
(OCoLC)930825169
Label
Imperfect creatures : vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740, Lucinda Cole
Publication
Bibliography note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Carrier category
volume
Carrier category code
  • nc
Carrier MARC source
rdacarrier
Content category
text
Content type code
  • txt
Content type MARC source
rdacontent
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
Control code
930825169
Dimensions
24 cm
Extent
vi, 240 pages
Isbn
9780472052950
Lccn
2015041734
Media category
unmediated
Media MARC source
rdamedia
Media type code
  • n
System control number
(OCoLC)930825169

Subject

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