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The Smallpox Report
After the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination has become synonymous with an opaque biopower that legislates compulsory immunization at a distance. Contemporary illness narratives have become outlets for distrust, misinformation, reckless denialism, and selfish noncompliance. In The Smallpox Report , Fuson Wang rewinds this contemporary impasse between physician and patient back to the Romantic-era origins of vaccination.
The book offers a literary-historical account of smallpox vaccination, contending that the disease’s eventual eradication in 1980 was as much a triumph of the literary imagination as it was an achievement of medical Enlightenment science. Wang traces our modern pandemic-era crisis of vaccine hesitancy back to Edward Jenner’s publication of his treatise on vaccination in 1798, the first rumblings of an anti-vaccination movement, and vaccination’s formative literary history that included authors such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The book concludes with a re-examination of the current deeply contentious public discourse about vaccines that has arisen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. By recovering the surprisingly literary genres of Romantic-era medical writing, The Smallpox Report models a new literary historical perspective on our own crises of vaccine refusal.
eBook
The Counterhuman Imaginary
The Counterhuman Imaginary
proposes that alongside the historical, social, and
institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole
subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is
everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that within
eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary
can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginary-an alternative
realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or
order.
Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift,
and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation
narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and
carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown
traces the ways presence and power of the nonhuman-weather, natural
disasters, animals, even the concept of love-not only influence
human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable
from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new
materialism, ecocriticism, and affect theory, The Counterhuman
Imaginary offers an original repudiation of the centrality of
the human to advance an integrative new methodology for reading
chaos, fluidity, force, and impossibility in literary culture.
eBook
The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought
Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality.
Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.
eBook
The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation
The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is necessary for capitalism.
Hanson treats rhetorical language as an archive of capital's accumulation through dispossession, in works by S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Moseley, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as in contemporary film and critical theory. Reading riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and the paradoxical coincidence of subsistence living with industrialization, Hanson shows the figural to be a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. But this survival is not always-already resistant to capitalism, nor are the origins of capital accumulation confined to the Romantic past. Hanson reveals rhetorical figure as entwined in deeply ambivalent ways with the circuitous, ongoing process of dispossession.
Reading both historically and rhetorically, Hanson argues that rhetorical language records histories of dispossession and the racialized, gendered distribution of the labor of subsistence. Romanticism, they show, is more contemporary than ever.
eBook
Thought’s Wilderness
While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of
nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it
is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism
shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues,
our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made.
Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing,
Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the
domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he
shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant,
G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy
Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable
forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the
\"world-surrounding ether.\" Further, he explains how nature's
vanishing-its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension-became
a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent
industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of
wilderness-a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and
that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately
eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between
conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself
could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann
proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist
instrumentality and its devastation of the world.
Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of
the aesthetics and politics of nature.
eBook