Title of Poster or Presentation
Political Ecology in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays
Submission Type
Oral/Paper Presentation
Degree Type
PhD
Discipline
Humanities
Department
English
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract or Description
This paper presents an overview of my dissertation project. My project harnesses posthumanist and ecofeminist insights to illuminate how the category of the human—whether its metaphysical status, purview, or validity—is at the center of early modern understandings of classical moral and political philosophies. In doing so, my study redresses a gap in the critical reception of Shakespeare’s Roman texts by challenging existing cross-historical, cross-cultural studies that (a) consider the human a stable construct and (b) overlook the capacity for nonhuman forces to impact humanity’s discursive and material practices. I extend ongoing critical debates by demonstrating how the figure of Aristotle’s “political animal” exceeds the human in Shakespeare’s Roman plays (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline) and narrative poetry (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece). Specifically, I argue that early modern literary representations of human agency in ancient Mediterranean sea- and land-scapes are positioned alongside, and often considered less favorably than, the forces exerted by other creatures, inert matter, or technologies.
Creative Commons License
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Political Ecology in Shakespeare’s Roman Plays
This paper presents an overview of my dissertation project. My project harnesses posthumanist and ecofeminist insights to illuminate how the category of the human—whether its metaphysical status, purview, or validity—is at the center of early modern understandings of classical moral and political philosophies. In doing so, my study redresses a gap in the critical reception of Shakespeare’s Roman texts by challenging existing cross-historical, cross-cultural studies that (a) consider the human a stable construct and (b) overlook the capacity for nonhuman forces to impact humanity’s discursive and material practices. I extend ongoing critical debates by demonstrating how the figure of Aristotle’s “political animal” exceeds the human in Shakespeare’s Roman plays (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline) and narrative poetry (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece). Specifically, I argue that early modern literary representations of human agency in ancient Mediterranean sea- and land-scapes are positioned alongside, and often considered less favorably than, the forces exerted by other creatures, inert matter, or technologies.
