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The Pain of Reformation argues that Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie
Queene represents an extended meditation on emerging notions of
physical, social, and affective vulnerability in Renaissance
England. Histories of violence, trauma, and injury have dominated
literary studies, often obscuring vulnerability, or an openness to
sensation, affect, and aesthetics that includes a wide range of
pleasures and pains. This book approaches early modern sensations
through the rubric of the vulnerable body, explores the emergence
of notions of shared vulnerability, and illuminates a larger
constellation of masculinity and ethics in post-Reformation
England. Spenser's era grappled with England's precarious political
position in a world tense with religious strife and fundamentally
transformed by the doctrinal and cultural sea changes of the
Reformation, which had serious implications for how masculinity,
affect, and corporeality would be experienced and represented.
Intimations of vulnerability often collided with the tropes of
heroic poetry, producing a combination of defensiveness, anxiety,
and shame. It has been easy to identify predictably violent
formations of early modern masculinity but more difficult to see
Renaissance literature as an exploration of vulnerability. The
underside of representations of violence in Spenser's poetry was a
contemplation of the precarious lives of subjects in
post-Reformation England. Spenser's adoption of the allegory of
Venus disarming Mars, understood in Renaissance Europe as an
allegory of peace, indicates that The Faerie Queene is a heroic
poem that militates against forms of violence and war that
threatened to engulf Europe and devastate an England eager to
militarize in response to perceived threats from within and
without. In pursuing an analysis, disarmament, and redefinition of
masculinity in response to a sense of shared vulnerability,
Spenser's poem reveals itself to be a vital archive of the way
gender, violence, pleasure, and pain were understood.
Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from
early modern England in order to understand how people in that era
thought about-and with-insect and arachnid life. The conversations
in this two-volume set address the collaborative, multigenerational
research that produced early modern natural history and provide new
insights into the old question of what it means to be human in a
world populated by beasts large and small. Volume 2, Concepts,
explores ideas that cut across species, insect and otherwise, both
building on and invigorating critical vocabularies developed over
nearly two decades of early modern animal studies. The contributors
explore topics such as the medical and culinary consumption of
insects; extermination campaigns; the auditory and emotive effects
of a swarm; insects and politics; and notions of infestation,
stinging, and creeping. Throughout, they illuminate how early
modern science and literature worked as intersecting systems of
knowledge production about the natural world and show definitively
how insect life was, and remains, intimately entangled with human
life. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume
include Lucinda Cole, Frances E. Dolan, Lowell Duckert, Andrew
Fleck, Rebecca Laroche, Jennifer Munroe, Amy L. Tigner, Jessica
Lynn Wolfe, Derek Woods, and Julian Yates.
Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of "critical
posthumanisms" in twenty-first-century literary and cultural
theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages
of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or
triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting
and interrogating them. What if today's "critical posthumanisms,"
even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of
the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works
from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if "the human"
is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered
amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital
materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice,
contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein
Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny
"contemporary"-and ally-of twenty-first-century critical
posthumanism.
Lesser Living Creatures examines literary and cultural texts from
early modern England in order to understand how people in that era
thought about-and with-insect and arachnid life. Designed for the
classroom, the book comprises two volumes-Insects and Concepts-that
can be used together or independently. Each addresses the
collaborative, multigenerational research that produced early
modern natural history and provides new insights into the old
question of what it means to be human in a world populated by
beasts large and small. Volume 1, Insects, examines how insects
burrowed into the literal and symbolic economies of the era. The
contributors consider diminutive creatures-such as bees and
beetles, flies and fleas, silkworms and spiders-and their
depictions in plays, poetry, fables, natural histories, and more.
In doing so, they illuminate how early modern science and
literature worked as intersecting systems of knowledge production
about the natural world and show definitively how insect life was,
and remains, intimately entangled with human life. In addition to
the editors, contributors to this volume include Chris Barrett,
Roya Biggie, Bruce Boehrer, Gary Bouchard, Dan Brayton, Eric Brown,
Mary Baine Campbell, Perry Guevara, Shannon Kelley, Emily King,
Karen Raber, Kathryn Vomero Santos, Donovan Sherman, and Steven
Swarbrick.
Whether wandering the paths of the imagination, driving through
sparsely populated countryside, or listening for the voices of
animals, Joseph Campana's poemsattend to the ways we are indelibly
marked by habitat. Shot full of accidental attachments and
reluctant transience, Natural Selectionsproduces from vibrant
contradiction potent song. In poems both lyric and expansive,
Natural Selections finds in the simplicity and strangeness of
middle America a complex metaphysics of place and an uncanny
perspective reminiscent of the landscapes of Grant Wood. Birds and
beasts, frequent storms, country roads, a fraught election, and
some of Ohio's literary guardian angels (James Wright, Hart Crane,
and Sherwood Anderson) haunt the poems. Whether enigmatically
refracted or brutally direct, these poems attend to the way life is
beautifully, violently, and unexpectedly marked by place. With a
boldness of vision that might overwhelm a lesser talent, Joseph
Campana gives us a collection guided by a focused intelligence and
yet containing wonderment and awe at its heart. By turns ferocious
and charming, contemporary and mythic, grief-stricken and funny,
the poet's voice is always original, direct, and pitch-perfect. The
poems in this book are a wonder.
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