Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …