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Introduction : stratigraphic criticism -- "Earth trembled" : Paradise lost, the little Ice Age, and the climate of allegory -- "The works of nature" : descriptive poetry and the history of the earth in Thomson's The seasons -- Mine, factory, and plantation : the industrial georgic and the crisis of description -- Uncertain atmospheres : romantic lyricism in the time of the Anthropocene.
Today, we tend to react skeptically to claims about our access to the animal mind, the political importance of compassion, and the natural origins of community. However, such claims were widespread in the Restoration and eighteenth century, the long Age of Sensibility. Even so famous a skeptic as the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote that animals undoubtedly feel, think, love, hate, will, and even reason. In "The Animal Claim," Tobias Menely shows that for Hume and other thinkers of his time, the acknowledgment of creaturely voice was crucial to their theories of community. Looking primarily to the long eighteenth century in Britain, Menely argues that sympathyincluding sympathy with animalscame to be regarded as a foundational resource of social relation, and that it fell to poets, in particular, to represent creaturely voice in the public sphere. Menely connects this development to new ideas of political community in Britain and the emergence of a viable discourse of animal rights in the age of legislative reform. The result is an original contribution to both animal studies and eighteenth-century scholarship."
Few terms have garnered more attention recently in the sciences, humanities, and public sphere than the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which a human “signature” appears in the lithostratigraphic record. Anthropocene Reading considers the implications of this concept for literary history and critical method. Entering into conversation with geologists and geographers, this volume reinterprets the cultural past in relation to the anthropogenic transformation of the Earth system while showcasing how literary analysis may help us conceptualize this geohistorical event. The contributors examine how a range of literary texts, from The Tempest to contemporary dystopian novels to the poetry ...
The Counterhuman Imaginary proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginary—an alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order. Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1...
Shifting perspective from the thematic approach of intellectual history to a more eclectic cultural criticism, Nash introduces a refreshing means to understanding both the figures of the wild man and the citizen of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.
Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850 is a collection of essays that charts important developments in the study of sport in the eighteenth century.
In Beasts of Burden, Ron Broglio examines how lives—human and animal—were counted in rural England and Scotland during the Romantic period. During this time, Britain experienced unprecedented data collection from censuses, ordinance surveys, and measurements of resources, all used to quantify the life and productivity of the nation. It was the dawn of biopolitics—the age in which biological life and its abilities became regulated by the state. Borne primarily by workers and livestock, nowhere was this regulation felt more powerfully than in the fields, commons, and enclosures. Using literature, art, and cultural texts of the period, Broglio explores the apparatus of biopolitics during ...
How the story of Noah's Flood was central to the development of a global environmental consciousness in early modern Europe. Winner, Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood, Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature, humanity, and...
Homo Temporalis focuses on the importance of temporal concepts for four German Jewish thinkers who profoundly shaped twentieth-century intellectual history: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. By analyzing the concept of time, Nitzan Lebovic explores Buber's stress on the temporality of the dialogue between I and Thou; Benjamin's now-time and "dialectics in standstill"; Arendt's understanding of democracy as "natality" or a "permanent revolution"; and the "breathturn" that informs Celan's poetry. Framing the reception of German Jewish thinking in the second half of the twentieth century as a parallel story to the rise of the modern humanities, Homo Temporalis also highlights how these foundational temporal concepts illuminate the causes of the present crisis in the humanities and its disciplinary limitations in the age of biopolitics and the Anthropocene.