The Inhuman Renaissance: Naturalist Poetics and Forms of Life Swarbrick, Steven Robert creator 2016 xiii, 275 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016) Rambuss, Richard Director Newman , Karen Reader Kuzner, James Reader Wilson, Elizabeth Reader Brown University. English sponsor theses “The Inhuman Renaissance” is a project in environmental history and literary analysis situated at the crossing of ecological and early modern science studies. In each of my four chapters, I theorize an inhumanist understanding of literary phenomena that focuses on the lively and vexed relations between material beings. I argue that the poets in this study—Sidney, Spenser, Ralegh, and Milton—conceive of poetic making as an active, affective, and sensuous engagement with the world’s becoming. Nature is not the “object” of their poetic practice but rather the network of material relations from which their poetics emerge. Through readings of these poets’ work, “The Inhuman Renaissance” develops a theory of early modern naturalist poetics aimed at highlighting the range of experimental possibility that affective encounters with nature open onto. At stake in this experimental poetics is what I call, after Deleuze, intensive naturalism—the idea that mind is an involuted form of nature, and that the human is fully imbricated in natural processes. Building on animal studies scholars who, in the past decade, have made important inroads in early modern debates about the nature of scientific inquiry and the impact of the Cartesian bête-machine hypothesis on human-animal relations, my focus on naturalism—that is, material relations beyond human and animal—rewrites the conditions of intimacy for experimental practice, and, in so doing, revises biopolitical conceptions of “bare life” and the spheres of public action that remain all too human in their definition. My inhumanist elaboration of poetic apparatuses entails reworking notions of materiality, agency, and ethics in connection with discourses shaped by race, sexuality, and disability. In this way, naturalist poetics remaps problematic divisions between inside and outside, and subject and object, so that the matter of poetic figures really does come to matter to our political, ethical, and aesthetic definitions of the human. Early modern literature history of science ecocriticism poetry and poetics Queer theory RPB 20160629 engEnglish10.7301/Z06D5RFWIn CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations