Search results for ""Author Laurie Shannon""
The University of Chicago Press The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales
Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hell-hounds. But he used the word "animal" only eight times in his work - which was typical for the sixteenth century, when the word was rarely used. As Laurie Shannon reveals in "The Accommodated Animal", the animal-human divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes' famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: "I think, therefore I am." Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what Shannon terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touch-stone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of "Genesis" to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering "the question of the animal" historically, "The Accommodated Animal" makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.
£26.96
The University of Chicago Press The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales
Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hell-hounds. But he used the word "animal" only eight times in his work - which was typical for the sixteenth century, when the word was rarely used. As Laurie Shannon reveals in "The Accommodated Animal", the animal-human divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes' famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: "I think, therefore I am." Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what Shannon terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touch-stone, Shannon explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of "Genesis" to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering "the question of the animal" historically, "The Accommodated Animal" makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts
Renaissance formulations of friendship typically cast the friend as "another self" and idealized a pair of friends as "one soul in two bodies." Laurie Shannon's Sovereign Amity puts this stress on the likeness of friends into context and offers a historical account of its place in English culture and politics.Shannon demonstrates that the likeness of sex and station urged in friendship enabled a civic parity not present in other social forms. Early modern friendship was nothing less than a utopian political discourse. It preceded the advent of liberal thought, and it made its case in the terms of gender, eroticism, counsel, and kingship. To show the power of friendship in early modernity, Shannon ranges widely among translations of classical essays; the works of Elizabeth I, Montaigne, Donne, and Bacon; and popular literature, to focus finally on the plays of Shakespeare. Her study will interest scholars of literature, history, gender, sexuality, and political thought, and anyone interested in a general account of the English Renaissance.
£28.78
