Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England

Literature, Natural Philosophy, Objects
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-138-94987-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Buch, Englisch, 208 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 448 g

Reihe: Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture

This book brings contemporary ways of reconceptualizing the human relationship to things into conversation with seventeenth-century writing, exploring how the literature of the period intersected with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter and how human beings might reconfigure their place in a web of nonhuman relations. Focusing on texts that cross the frontier between literature and science, Snider recovers the material and body worlds of seventeenth-century culture as treated in poetry, natural philosophy, medical treatises, comedy, and prose fiction. He shows how a range of writers understood and theorized “matter,” “bodies,” and “spirits” as characters in complex and sometimes bizarre scenarios involving human relationships to the phenomenal world. The logic that made matter subject to uniform theorizing facilitated a crossing of boundaries between the human and nonhuman and became a persistent figure of explanation at the time when distinctions between the natural and the artificial were undergoing reformulation.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Snider, Alvin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Silk: Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes”

Chapter 2: Ice: Paradise Lost under Northern Skies

Chapter 3: Blood: Animal Transfusion

Chapter 4: Worlds: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Alvin Snider taught at universities in Canada, the United States, and France. He is the author of Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler and Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Iowa, USA.