Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England: Literature, Natural Philosophy, Objects (Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture)

Synopsis

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.

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781317362531

Related ISBNs:

9781315668918, 9781317362548, 9781317362524, 9781138949874

Publisher:

Taylor & Francis

Date of Addition:

11/28/24

Copyrighted By:

Alvin Snider, The right of Alvin Snider to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.