The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature

The Counterhuman Imaginary argues that alongside human reality, there is an other-than-human world that influences human creativity, subjectivity, and history. It suggests that nonhuman presence and power, such as weather, natural disasters, animals, and love, are inseparable from human creativity and are essential to understanding it.

Format: Unspecified
Length: 162 pages
Publication date: 15 November 2023
Publisher: Cornell University Press

The Counterhuman Imaginary posits that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that appear to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is ubiquitous. Laura Brown argues that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be perceived as a counterhuman imaginary—an alternative realm whose scope and terms surpass human understanding or order. Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, alongside lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that grant agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown traces the ways in which the presence and power of the nonhuman—weather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of love—not only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, and affect theory, The Counterhuman Imaginary offers an original repudiation of the centrality of the human to advance an integrative new methodology for reading chaos, fluidity, force, and impossibility in literary culture.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501773242