Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to Bacon: Rethinking Cosmopolis / Edition 1

by Elizabeth Gruber

Overview

The work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has often been the testing-ground for innovations in literary studies, but this has not been true of ecocriticism. This is partly because, until recently, most ecologically minded writers have located the origins of ecological crisis in the Enlightenment, with the legacies of the Cartesian cogito singled out as a particular cause of our current woes. Traditionally, Renaissance writers were tacitly (or, occasionally, overtly) presumed to be oblivious of environmental degradation and unaware that the episteme—the conceptual edifice of their historical moment—was beginning to crack. This perception is beginning to change, and Dr. Guber's work is poised to illuminate the burgeoning number of ecocritical studies devoted to this period, in particular, by showing how the classical concept of the cosmopolis, which posited the harmonious integration of the Order of Nature (cosmos) with the Order of Society (polis), was at once revived and also systematically dismantled in the Renaissance. Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to Bacon: Rethinking Cosmopolis demonstrates that the Renaissance is the hinge, the crucial turning point in the human-nature relationship and examines the persisting ecological consequences of the nature-state’s demise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367886356
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Series:	Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
Pages:	188
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Gruber is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Lock Haven University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Rethinking Cosmopolis 1

1 Richard III as Nature's "Black Intelligencer" 38

2 The Gravid Earth: Exploring the Ecological Imaginary in The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus 65

3 The Problem of Indistinction in Measure for Measure and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore 88

4 Vanitas and the Ecopolitics of Despair in Macbeth 108

5 "Desolate Strangers": An Ecocritique of Vulnerability in The New Atlantis 133

Bliography 159

Index 173