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The Accommodated Animal

Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales

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ISBN: 9780226924175
Published January 2013
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Published January 2013
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ISBN: 9780226924182
Published January 2013
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ISBN: 9780226924182
Published January 2013
pdf
$31.99
ISBN: 9780226924182
Published January 2013
pdf (45 days)
$12.50
ISBN: 9780226924182
Published January 2013

The Accommodated Animal

Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales

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.
 
With Shakespeare as her touchstone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, The Accommodated Animal makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.

312 pages | 4 color plates, 25 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2013

History: History of Ideas

Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature, General Criticism and Critical Theory

Reviews

“Writing with undeniable meticulousness and care, Shannon undertakes to weave together an incredibly broad range of dense subject matter, from philosophy and ethics to history, literature, myth, and science. . . . Readable and engaging. . . . Highly recommended.”

Choice

“This big, beautiful, growling, howling book is as revelatory about language as it is about the natural history of our animal kinships: the ‘curtailed’ dog, the ‘sovereignties’ of motion, and the ‘race’ of locomotive animals invite us to encounter familiar words on all fours, our phantom tails and impotent noses newly alert to semantic climate changes.”

Julia Reinhard Lupton | Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

 “In forceful, vivid, sometimes playful language, Shannon lays out a conception of community as cosmopolity.”

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

Table of 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
    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

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

TAIL  Raleigh’s Ark: The Early Modern Arithmetic of Livestock

Index

Awards

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 & Rice University: Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award
Won

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