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

In recent years, many disciplines within the humanities have become increasingly concerned with non-human actors and entities. The environment, animals, machines, objects, weather, and other non-human beings and things have taken center stage to challenge assumptions about what we have traditionally called the human. Informed by theoretical approaches like posthumanism, the new materialisms (including Actor Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and similar approaches), ecocriticism, and critical animal studies, such scholarship has until now had no separate and identifiable collective home at an academic press. This series will provide that home, publishing work that shares a concern with the non-human in literary and cultural studies. The series invites single-authored books and essay collections that focus primarily on literary texts, but from an interdisciplinary, theoretically-informed perspective; it will include work that crosses geographical and period boundaries. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.

Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature

Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies

Rebecca Ann Bach

Race Matters, Animal Matters

Fugitive Humanism in African America, 18381934

Lindgren Johnson

Plants in Contemporary Poetry

Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination

John Charles Ryan

Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture

Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation

Rebecca Totaro

Thanks first to 20062007 Folger Institute Year-Long Colloquium members and director who helped me shape the first stages of this project in the year prior to and including my sabbatical from Florida Gulf Coast University. Additional review of versions of each chapter occurred at or in communications following content-related national and international conferences, including meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, Renaissance Society of America, Sixteenth Century Society, World Shakespeare Congress, Modern Language Association, Spenser Society and John Donne Society. Florida Gulf Coast University staff, faculty, administration, and students also read drafts; contributed to content by way of scholarly and in-class discussion of related topics; and/or offered support for conference travel. Debts of gratitude are for special colleagues who engaged with me over months of scholarly writing exchange: Delphine Gras, Kimberly Jackson, Mary Crone-Romanovski, Masami Sugimori, Fiona Tolhurst, Tim Sutton, and Laci Mattison. And to graduate student readers Susan Rojas, Kelsey Fischell, Savannah Jensen, Morgan Souza, and undergraduates Clare Brinkman, Kelsey Luft, and Chandler Rae Tarquino. Support across the university also has come generously from librarian faculty Rebecca Donlan, Rachel Cooke, and Rachel Tate-Ripperden, and from deans Bob Gregerson, Aswani Volety, and Donna Henry. My warmest appreciation for targeted, generous content suggestions after a full reading of the manuscript is for Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Eggert, Susan Staub, and Mary Thomas Crane. Readers of content over time in conference paper and seminar form have also helped me improve the whole; special thanks here to Mary Trull, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Darryl Chalk, Amy Tigner, Karen Raber, Jennifer Munroe, Rebecca Laroche, Garrett Sullivan, Margaret Healy, Shanyn Altman, Tiffany Jo Werth, Lyman Tower Sargeant, and Richelle Munkhoff, as well as to the several anonymous external reviewers selected by Routledge and, again, to Karen Raber, editor of the Routledge Series Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture , and editorial staff Jennifer Abbott, Alison Daltroy, Veronica Haggar, Autumn Spalding, Megan Hiatt, and (until recently with Routledge) Liz Levine. And with much love from Keith, Vicky and Michael, Mom and Dad, Marta, Sylvia, Chris and Starr, Chris and Phil, and (meow meow) Liam and Lucas. It takes a village (and thank goodness for that).