This book brings contemporary ways of reconceptualizing the human relationship to things into conversation with seventeenth-century writing exploring how the literature of the period intersected with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter and how human beings might reconfigure their place in a web of nonhuman relations. Focusing on texts that cross the frontier between literature and science Snider recovers the material and body worlds of seventeenth-century culture as treated in poetry natural philosophy medical treatises comedy and prose fiction. He shows how a range of writers understood and theorized “matter ” “bodies ” and “spirits” as characters in complex and sometimes bizarre scenarios involving human relationships to the phenomenal world. The logic that made matter subject to uniform theorizing facilitated a crossing of boundaries between the human and nonhuman and became a persistent figure of explanation at the time when distinctions between the natural and the artificial were undergoing reformulation. |Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England Literature Natural Philosophy Objects | Literature
