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BestsellerE-book
Author Cole, Lucinda, author.

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

Publication Info. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2016.
©2016

Item Status

Description 1 online resource
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Series Book collections on Project MUSE.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
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, the Earl of 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, irrational 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.
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.
Local Note JSTOR Books at JSTOR Open Access
Subject Science in literature.
Science in literature.
Literature and science -- History -- 17th century.
Literature and science.
History.
Chronological Term 17th century
Subject Literature and science -- History -- 18th century.
Chronological Term 18th century
Subject Pests in literature.
Pests in literature.
Chronological Term 1600-1799
Genre/Form Electronic books.
History.
Electronic books.
Other Form: Print version: Cole, Lucinda. Imperfect creatures : vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740. Ann Arbor, [Michigan] : University of Michigan Press, ©2016 240 pages 9780472072958 (OCoLC)2015041734
ISBN 9780472121557 (electronic book)
0472121553 (electronic book)
0472072951 (electronic book)
9780472072958 (electronic book)
0472052950 (electronic book)
9780472052950 (electronic book)
9780472900633 (electronic book)
0472900633 (electronic book)
Standard No. 10.3998/mpub.4424519