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

Resource Information

The work Imperfect creatures : vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740 represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

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

Title remainder

vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740

Statement of responsibility

Lucinda Cole

Creator

• Cole, Lucinda

Author

• Cole, Lucinda

Subject

• English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism
• Human-animal relationships
• Human-animal relationships in literature
• Animals as carriers of disease
• Literature and science -- England -- History -- 17th century
• NATURE / Animals / General
• Pests in literature
• LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance
• English literature -- 17th century -- History and criticism

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

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