Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture - Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation

Informationen zum Autor Rebecca Totaro is a Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. Zusammenfassung Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation provides the first sustained examination of the foundational set of early modern beliefs linking meteorology and physiology. This was a relationship so intimate and, to us, poetic that we have spent centuries assuming early moderns were using figurative language when they represented the matter and motions of their bodies in meteorological terms and weather events in physiological ones. Early moderns believed they inhabited a geocentric universe in which the matter and motions constituting all sublunary things were the same and that therefore all things were compositionally and interactively related. What physically generated anger, erotic desire, and plague also generated thunder, the earthquake, and the comet. As a result, the interpretation of meteorological events, such as the 1580 earthquake in the Dover Strait, was consequential. With its radical and seemingly spontaneous shaking, an earthquake could expose inconvenient truths about the cause of matter and motion and about what, if anything, distinguishes humans from every other thing and from events. Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture reveals a need for reexamination of all representations of meteorology and physiology in the period. This reexamination begins here with a focus on the Titanic metamorphoses captured by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and the many writers responding to the 1580 earthquake. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. A Tale Put in for Pleasure Chapter 2. The Sneezing of the Earth Chapter 3. Much Enmoved, but Steadfast Still Persevered Chapter 4. Like an Overcharged Gun Chapter 5. These Signs Have Marked Me Extraordinary Chapter 6. These Earthquakes in Himself Afterword Index ...

Product details

• Authors: Totaro, Rebecca Totaro
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2017
• EAN: 9781138092167
• ISBN: 978-1-138-09216-7
• No. of pages: 172
• Series: Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture; Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / General, SCIENCE / Earth Sciences / Meteorology & Climatology, LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance, NATURE / Earthquakes & Volcanoes, Ireland, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Literary studies: general, Meteorology and climatology, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literature: history and criticism, The Earth: natural history: general interest, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600