Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture
Brand: University of Pennsylvania Press
Categories: Books, Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism



Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.3 x 9.1 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0812251319
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0812251318
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Print length: 364 pages
Publication date: June 28, 2019
subtitle: Hardcover – June 28, 2019
author: Lynn Festa
review: Editorial Reviews Review Fiction without Humanity is a dauntingly learned book, in which Lynn Festa deploys and contributes to such diverse fields as thing theory, animal studies, art history, the history of science, folklore, rhetoric and grammar, and Peircean semiotics." ― Eighteenth Century Fiction Fiction Without Humanity is a profound book that tenders as many pleasures as Pope or Swift as it dances between empirical minima (fleas, flies, personal pronouns, unmatched shoes) and concepts and questions that remain urgent today: Just what makes a thing count as human? How does literary form participate in this accounting? What, specifically, does literature do to, with, for us humans? Lynn Festa has written a posthumanist classic-albeit one that returns us to a new and more demanding humanity. ― Jayne Lewis, author of Air's Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 With its critical attention to such things as birds, insects, paintings, scientific engravings, riddles, fables, and Robinson Crusoe's island, Fiction Without Humanity offers an ambitious and persuasive account of the meaning of 'humanity'-and humanity's fictions-from radically other points of view. This book marks a bracing and mobilizing intervention in eighteenth-century eco-criticism as well as the environmental humanities more generally. ― Helen Thompson, author of Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel Book Description Drawing on the estranging perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things in riddles, fables, novels, scientific treatises, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting, Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. About the Author Lynn Festa is Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction Chapter 1. Bird's-Eye View Chapter 2. Lousy Bodies Chapter 3. Anthropomorphic Things Chapter 4. Flea, Fly, Fable Chapter 5. Crusoe's Island of Misfit Things Coda Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments Read more