Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence
of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, "humanity" is an
elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and
political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a
literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in
which human difference from animals, things, and machines was
expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated
humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into
being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of
literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices- the
riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and
still-life painting- Fiction Without Humanity focuses on
experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and
inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from
sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early
Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the
enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that
distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative
model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to
human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from
canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an
alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these
early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate
novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By
placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles,
scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less
from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented
world to a distinctively human point of view.
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