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D. Van Renen, Nature and the New Science in England, 1665-1726

D. Van Renen, Nature and the New Science in England, 1665-1726

Publié le par Vincent Ferré (Source : Emma Burridge)

Nature and the new science in England, 1665–1726

by Denys Van Renen

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2018:08

ISBN 9781786941374, 272 pages, £65.00

 

Denys Van Renen examines the tension between the cartographic framework with which Europeans conceptualize foreign lands and the literary representations of ecological processes, socio-cultural practices, economic systems, and gendered behaviors. Through the works of Milton, Behn, and Defoe, he demonstrates how British literature promotes cultural and biotic exchanges between the human and nonhuman.

  • Reassesses canonical British authors who are widely taught (Milton, Marvell, Behn, Dryden, Montagu, Defoe).
  • Shifts attention to Restoration England (and away from the Romantic era) as the foundation for ethical and sustainable environmental practices.
  • Studies plays, poetry, and novels set across five continents, examining the receptiveness of the British to indigenous practices and various micro and macro ecologies.

“The premise of Nature and the New Science is that natural systems shape poetry, philosophy, geography, and politics. […] from 1665-1726, nature operated as the medium through which the British sought the unknown, interpreted contact with others abroad, and allowed them to explore the self and adapt to new political and economic realities.” (Read Van Renen’s accompanying blog post here)

 

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. ‘Think there’: nature and cognition in Restoration England
i. Miltonic environments
ii. Re-cognition in a postlapsarian world
iii. Stimulated by nature: reembodying England
iv. Natures after the Renaissance

2. Royalism, the new science and Native representational systems in America
i. Reclaiming the nation in The Indian queen and in The Indian emperor
ii. Salvaging Native epistemologies
iii. The ‘noble earth’
iv. Coda

3. Fantasies of ‘natural’ imperialism in the Far East
i. Pivoting from America to Asian cultures and environments
ii. Indamora and the Eastern improvisator
iii. Coda

4. Artifice and adaptability on the borders of ‘Europe’
i. The European semiotics of fashion
ii. Erasing borders and reestablishing cross-cultural ties in the Ottoman Empire
iii. The limits of women’s intimacy

5. Reconfiguring the borders of the human
i. The howling within / hollowing out of Western ideologies
ii. Abandonment: reembodying the animal

Coda: Scottish Enlightenment and the invention of nature
i. Exploring the Arctic: the last refuge of nature
ii. Scotland as ‘another form’?

Bibliography
i. Primary works
ii. Secondary works
iii. Other useful works

Index

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Denys Van Renen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of 'The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern England' and co-editor of 'Beyond 1776'. He has a critical edition of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals forthcoming.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.