{"product_id":"fiction-without-humanity-9780812251319","title":"Fiction Without Humanity","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough 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 devices the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting Fiction 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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eFiction without Humanity\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"\" * \u003ci\u003eEighteenth Century Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e *\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eFiction Without Humanity\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eAir's Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794\u003c\/i\u003e *\u003cbr\u003e\"With its critical attention to such things as birds, insects, paintings, scientific engravings, riddles, fables, and Robinson Crusoe's island, \u003ci\u003eFiction Without Humanity\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eFictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel\u003c\/i\u003e *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 1. Bird's-Eye View\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 2. Lousy Bodies\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 3. Anthropomorphic Things\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 4. Flea, Fly, Fable\u003cbr\u003e Chapter 5. Crusoe's Island of Misfit Things\u003cbr\u003e Coda\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Bibliography\u003cbr\u003e Index\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Pennsylvania Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49405740581207,"sku":"9780812251319","price":70.55,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780812251319.jpg?v=1730493448","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/fiction-without-humanity-9780812251319","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}