Fiction without humanity : person, animal, thing in early Enlightenment literature and culture /

"Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, 'humanity' is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of la...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Festa, Lynn M. (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published:Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019]
©2019
Subjects:
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100 1 |a Festa, Lynn M.  |q (Lynn Mary),  |e author.  |0 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no2003100940 
245 1 0 |a Fiction without humanity :  |b person, animal, thing in early Enlightenment literature and culture /  |c Lynn Festa. 
264 1 |a Philadelphia :  |b University of Pennsylvania Press,  |c [2019] 
264 4 |c ©2019 
300 |a 350 pages, 4 unnumbered pages of plates :  |b illustrations (some color) ;  |c 24 cm 
336 |a text  |b txt  |2 rdacontent. 
336 |a still image  |b sti  |2 rdacontent. 
337 |a unmediated  |b n  |2 rdamedia. 
338 |a volume  |b nc  |2 rdacarrier. 
504 |a Includes bibliographical references and index. 
520 |a "Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, 'humanity' is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devicesthe riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life paintingFiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view."--Book jacket. 
505 0 |a Introduction -- Bird's-eye view -- Lousy bodies -- Anthropomorphic things -- Flea, fly, fable -- Crusoe's island of misfit things -- Coda. 
590 |a 12/19/19 englb BT. 
650 0 |a English prose literature  |y 18th century  |x History and criticism.  |0 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008103103 
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650 0 |a Philosophical anthropology  |z Europe  |x History. 
650 0 |a Fictions, Theory of.  |0 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85048070 
650 0 |a Enlightenment  |z Europe.  |0 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008119708 
650 0 |a Anthropomorphism in literature.  |0 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh93008391 
650 0 |a Humanity in literature.  |0 http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh94004726 
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