Synopses & Reviews
What is, what was the human? This book argues that the making of the human as it is now understood implies a renogotiation of the relationship between the self and the world. The development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy paradoxically also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen, and cyborgs) and border practices (science, surveying, and pornography).
Review
"All [the essays] are lively and original, and offer new perspectives on a provocative and... inexhaustible subject" --Eileen Reeves,
Renaissance Quarterly
Synopsis
What is, what was the human? This book argues that the making of the human as it is now understood implies a renogotiation of the relationship between the self and the world. The development of Renaissance technologies of difference such as mapping, colonialism and anatomy paradoxically also illuminated the similarities between human and non-human. This collection considers the borders between humans and their imagined others: animals, women, native subjects, machines. It examines border creatures (hermaphrodites, wildmen, and cyborgs) and border practices (science, surveying, and pornography).
About the Author
Erica Fudge is Lecturer in English Literary Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University.
Gilbert Ruth is Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton.
Susan Wiseman is Lecturer in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements * List of Illustrations * Notes on the Contributors * Introduction: the Dislocation of the Human; E. Fudge, R. Gilbert, S.J. Wiseman * Humanity at a Price: Erasmus, Budé, and the Poverty of Philology; A. Stewart * Animal Passions and Human Science: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World; B. Cummings * Bodily Regimen and Fear of the Beast: "Plausibility" in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy; M. Healy * Midwifery and the New Science in the Seventeenth Century: Language, Print and the Theatre; * J. Sanders * Calling Creatures By Their True Names: Bacon, the New Science and the Beast in Man; E. Fudge * Cartographic Arrest: Harvey, Raleigh, Drayton and the Mapping of Sense; S. Speed * "The Doubtful Traveller": Mathematics, Metaphor, and the Cartographic Origins of the American Frontier; J. Edwards * Seeing and Knowing: Science, Pornography and Early Modern Hermaphrodites; R. Gilbert * "Forms Such as Never Were in Nature": The Renaissance Cyborg; J. Sawday * Bodies Without Souls; The Case of Peter the Wild Boy; M. Newton * Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape-Human Transformations in Hobbes, Bulwer, Rousseau; S. Wiseman * The Economy of Nymphomania: Luxury, Virtue, Sentiment and Desire in Mid-Eighteenth Century Medical Discourse; M. Peace * Index