rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Imperfect creatures
    sub title: vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740
  name:
    name part: Cole, Lucinda
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: miu
    date issued: 2016
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: vi, 240 pages ; 24 cm
  abstract: "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. "--
  table of 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.
  note: Lucinda Cole.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: e-uk-en
  subject:
    topic: English literature
    temporal: 17th century
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: English literature
    temporal: 18th century
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: Pests in literature
  subject:
    topic: Human-animal relationships in literature
  subject:
    topic: Human-animal relationships
  subject:
    topic: Animals as carriers of disease
  subject:
    topic: Literature and science
    geographic: England
    topic: History
    temporal: 17th century
  subject:
    topic: NATURE / Animals / General
  subject:
    topic: LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance
  classification: PR438.P48 C86 2016
  classification: 820.9/36
  classification: NAT001000 LIT019000
  identifier: 9780472072958
  identifier: 0472072951
  identifier: 9780472121557
  identifier: 9780472052950
  identifier: 0472052950
  identifier: 2015041734
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 160111
    record change date: 20170927134726.0
    record identifier: in00003771907
    language of cataloging:
      language term: eng