The Accommodated Animal
Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales
312 pages
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4 color plates, 25 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2013
Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity.
Valerie Traub, University of Michigan
“No other early modernist prosecutes a case with the exactitude of Laurie Shannon, whose ethical attention to the exercise of rights and authority informs every word she writes. With acumen and grace, she reveals the presence of a zootopian constitution, in which humans and other animals were all included within the scope of meaningful justice. Beyond issuing a potent challenge to the common practice of reading animals as metaphors for human behaviors—and thereby radically revising our interpretations of central texts—she opens a capacious window onto the cosmopolity of early modern culture.”
Cary Wolfe, Rice University
“In this wonderfully written and deeply researched book, Laurie Shannon unearths in early modern culture what teems beneath the generic designation, ‘animal,’ to which we have become accustomed over the past four hundred years: a wild and woolly ‘zoography’ of fish and fowl, ‘beasts’ and ‘brutes,’ nonhuman agents and four-footed actors, all cheek to jowl with human beings as ‘fellow-commoners’ in a trans-species polity, where questions of sovereignty, tyranny, and justice bear directly upon how we treat nonhuman beings. Ranging across legal, literary, philosophical, theological, and scientific texts, The Accommodated Animal finds posthumanism very much alive and well, avant la lettre, in the early modern period’s soul-searching attempts to secure our place among the remarkable variety of life that challenges our most cherished and self-flattering biases about the human animal.”
David Bevington, University of Chicago
“Beautifully written, Laurie Shannon’s book explores ways in which questions of sovereignty and rule bear on our treatment of non-human beings, posing a wonderful challenge to our complacent view of what we think it means to be human. A book to set beside Montaigne.”
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
“In forceful, vivid, sometimes playful language, Shannon lays out a conception of community as cosmopolity.”
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Texts and Terms
Face Creatures and Cosmopolitans: Before “the Animal”
The Eight Animals in Shakespeare
Trials of Membership: Montaigne versus Descartes
The Range of Chapters
Looking Back
1 The Law’s First Subjects: Animal Stakeholders, Human Tyranny, and the Political Life of Early Modern Genesis
A Zootopian Constitution
The Political Terms of Cross-Species Relations
Bestiae contra Tyrannos: Sidney’s “Ister Bank”
Desert Citizens: Edenic Species-Memory in Shakespeare’s Arden
2 A Cat May Look upon a King: Four-Footed Estate, Locomotion, and the Prerogative of Free Animals
Biped Fantasies: Mah-ah-ah-ah-ah-narch of All I Survey!
The Course of Kind, “Unyoked”
Fight, Flight or Stay and Obey: Animal Prerogatives
The Flick of History’s Tail: “&c”
3 Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Happiness and the Zoographic Critique of Humanity
The Insufficient Animal
Nudus in Nuda Terra: Unaccommodated Man
The Animals Testify: Plutarch and Gelli
The Unhappy Beast in King Lear
4 Night-Rule: The Alternative Politics of the Dark; or, Empires of the Nonhuman
Night’s Black Agents, Human Night-Blindness
Contingencies of Kind: “Who Knowes?”
Baldwin’s Beware the Cat: Assisted Cognition Reveals Feline Empire!
Where the Vile Things Rule: A Midsummer Night
5 Hang-Dog Looks: From Subjects at Law to Objects of Science in Animal Trials
Answerable Animals in a Justiciable Cosmos
Whip Him Out; Hang Him Up! Cosmopolity in The Merchant of Venice
Laid on by Manacles: Disanimation, Vivisection, and the Vacuum Tube
A Scotch Verdict on Humanity/00
Tail Raleigh’s Ark: The Early Modern Arithmetic of Livestock
Index
Acknowledgments
Note on Texts and Terms
Face Creatures and Cosmopolitans: Before “the Animal”
The Eight Animals in Shakespeare
Trials of Membership: Montaigne versus Descartes
The Range of Chapters
Looking Back
1 The Law’s First Subjects: Animal Stakeholders, Human Tyranny, and the Political Life of Early Modern Genesis
A Zootopian Constitution
The Political Terms of Cross-Species Relations
Bestiae contra Tyrannos: Sidney’s “Ister Bank”
Desert Citizens: Edenic Species-Memory in Shakespeare’s Arden
2 A Cat May Look upon a King: Four-Footed Estate, Locomotion, and the Prerogative of Free Animals
Biped Fantasies: Mah-ah-ah-ah-ah-narch of All I Survey!
The Course of Kind, “Unyoked”
Fight, Flight or Stay and Obey: Animal Prerogatives
The Flick of History’s Tail: “&c”
3 Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Happiness and the Zoographic Critique of Humanity
The Insufficient Animal
Nudus in Nuda Terra: Unaccommodated Man
The Animals Testify: Plutarch and Gelli
The Unhappy Beast in King Lear
4 Night-Rule: The Alternative Politics of the Dark; or, Empires of the Nonhuman
Night’s Black Agents, Human Night-Blindness
Contingencies of Kind: “Who Knowes?”
Baldwin’s Beware the Cat: Assisted Cognition Reveals Feline Empire!
Where the Vile Things Rule: A Midsummer Night
5 Hang-Dog Looks: From Subjects at Law to Objects of Science in Animal Trials
Answerable Animals in a Justiciable Cosmos
Whip Him Out; Hang Him Up! Cosmopolity in The Merchant of Venice
Laid on by Manacles: Disanimation, Vivisection, and the Vacuum Tube
A Scotch Verdict on Humanity/00
Tail Raleigh’s Ark: The Early Modern Arithmetic of Livestock
Index
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History: History of Ideas
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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