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03841aam a2200469 i 4500 001 1AB11FE06B5411E69AFE1DDBDAD10320 003 SILO 005 20160826010517 008 160111s2016 miua b s001 0 eng 010 $a 2015041734 020 $a 0472052950 020 $a 9780472052950 020 $a 0472072951 020 $a 9780472072958 035 $a (OCoLC)930825169 040 $a DLC $e rda $b eng $c DLC $d YDX $d YDXCP $d CUV $d BTCTA $d BDX $d SILO 042 $a pcc 043 $a e-uk-en 050 00 $a PR438.P48 C86 2016 082 00 $a 820.9/36 $2 23 084 $a LIT019000 $a LIT019000 $2 bisacsh 100 1 $a Cole, Lucinda, $e author. 245 10 $a Imperfect creatures : $b vermin, literature, and the sciences of life, 1600-1740 / $c Lucinda Cole. 264 1 $a Ann Arbor : $b University of Michigan Press, $c [2016] 300 $a vi, 240 pages ; $c 24 cm 520 $a "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. "-- $c Provided by publisher. 504 $a Includes bibliographical references and index. 505 0 $a 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. 650 0 $a English literature $y 17th century $x History and criticism. 650 0 $a English literature $y 18th century $x History and criticism. 650 0 $a Pests in literature. 650 0 $a Human-animal relationships in literature. 650 0 $a Human-animal relationships. 650 0 $a Animals as carriers of disease. 650 0 $a Literature and science $z England $x History $y 17th century. 650 7 $a NATURE / Animals / General. $2 bisacsh 650 7 $a LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance. $2 bisacsh 941 $a 2 952 $l OVUX522 $d 20171226044325.0 952 $l USUX851 $d 20160826050654.0 956 $a http://locator.silo.lib.ia.us/search.cgi?index_0=id&term_0=1AB11FE06B5411E69AFE1DDBDAD10320 994 $a 92 $b IWAInitiate Another SILO Locator Search