War and Ecology in the Early Modern Period: Iago's Dream

ISBN-13: 9781138708853 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 282 str.

Benjamin Bertram

Opis

War and Ecology in the Early Modern World argues that early modern war frequently unsettled humancenteredness, but it ultimately strengthened humans sense of autonomy and singularity. The early modern period is hardly unique in this way: while we carelessly invoke words like "inhuman" to characterize the horrors of war, we neglect to examine the way war interpellates us as human. Although it destabilizes the categories we use to separate the human from the nonhuman, it also shapes the physical environment for human and nonhuman species, giving humans the illusion of physical and intellectual separation. Critiques of humanism and/or anthropocentrism tend to focus on philosophical, scientific, or theological ideas the animal rationale, the domination of nature, or Christian hierarchies. The sense of human superiority that Bertram explores here, on the other hand, rarely appears in an explicit fashion as an ideology or philosophy. It is not found in Descartes or Christian theology, yet it is quite possible that those forms of humancenteredness are in fact indebted to the sense of human superiority examined, namely, that the experience of action during perpetual war makes us regard ourselves, sometimes consciously and sometimes not as human. Our conscious ideas about the human/animal distinction are less important than our actions and practices. War like zoos, laboratory experiments, or factory farming interpellates us as human."

Spis treści

List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1 Erasmus and the Dung Beetle; or, Human Exceptionalism and Its Discontents; Chapter 2 Machiavelli, Virtù, and the Ecology of War; Chapter 3 Iron Men: Thomas Digges, A Larum for London, and the Elizabethan Cyborg; Chapter 4 War and Resilience: Tamburlaine the Great and the Anglo-Spanish War; Chapter 5 Bestial Oblivion in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Chapter 6 Thomas Coryate, the Lousy Humanist; Chapter 7 Humanity Under Siege: Francis Bacon’s Human Empire and the Capitalocene; Author Index; Subject Index

O autorze

Benjamin Bertram is Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, USA. His publications include articles in the Routledge Handbook on Shakespeare and Animals (forthcoming), Modern Philology, English Literature, Exemplaria, and Boundary 2. His first book, The Time is Out of Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England, was published in 2004.