Nature and the new science in England, 1665-1726
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Nature and the new science in England, 1665-1726
（Oxford University studies in the Enlightenment, 2018:08）
Voltaire Foundation, c2018
- : [pbk.]
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Note
Bibliography: p. 237-249
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
When scholars of cultural studies consider representations of the land by British writers, the Romantic poets continue to dominate the enquiry, as though the period right before the intensification of the Industrial Revolution offers readers one last glimpse of untarnished nature. Denys Van Renen instead examines the British authors writing in the decades following the Restoration of Charles II, writers whose literary works re-animate and re-embody the land as a site of dynamic interactions, and, through this, reveal how various cultural systems and ecologies shape notions of self and national identity.
Van Renen presents a rich and varied cultural history of ecological exchange-a history that begins in the 1660s, with Milton and Marvell's rejection of established Renaissance constructs, and ends with Defoe's Farther Adventures, in which the noise of the persistent howls of animals pierces human representational systems, arguing that British literature from 1665-1726 represents a cognitive symbiosis between human and non-human.
As humans attempt to reduce the adverse effect of the Anthropocene, the author ultimately proposes that the aesthetics of British writers from the Restoration and early eighteenth century might be mobilized in order to rebind humans to their environs.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. 'Think there': nature and cognition in Restoration England
i. Miltonic environments
ii. Re-cognition in a postlapsarian world
iii. Stimulated by nature: reembodying England
iv. Natures after the Renaissance
2. Royalism, the new science and Native representational systems
in America
i. Reclaiming the nation in The Indian queen and in
The Indian emperour
ii. Salvaging Native epistemologies
iii. The 'noble earth'
iv. Coda
3. Fantasies of 'natural' imperialism in the Far East
i. Pivoting from America to Asian cultures
and environments
ii. Indamora and the Eastern improvisator
iii. Coda
4. Artifice and adaptability on the borders of 'Europe'
i. The European semiotics of fashion
ii. Erasing borders and reestablishing cross-cultural ties in
the Ottoman Empire
iii. The limits of women's intimacy
5. Reconfiguring the borders of the human
i. The howling within / hollowing out
of Western ideologies
ii. Abandonment: reembodying the animal
Coda: Scottish Enlightenment and the invention of nature
i. Exploring the Arctic: the last refuge of nature
ii. Scotland as 'another form'?
Bibliography
i. Primary works
ii. Secondary works
iii. Other useful works
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
