FICTION WITHOUT HUMANITY: PERSON, ANIMAL, THING IN EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Book ID/图书代码： 13567919C00005

English Summary/英文概要： Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, "humanity" is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices- the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l’oeil and still-life painting- Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 是什麼使人類成為人類？

現代我們熟悉的「人性」這個概念是如何形成的？

文學又如何參與這個過程？

具體來說，文學對我們人類、為我們人類、和我們人類做什麼？

儘管啟蒙運動通常被認為與人權和人道主義的起源有關，但「人性」在這一時期的文學、哲學、科學和政治著作中仍是一個難以捉摸的概念。

本書是一部關於十七世紀晚期和十八世紀早期人類定義的文學史。Lynn Festa聚焦於文學和藝術如何描述人類與動物、事物和機器之間的差異，研究作家和藝術家如何將「人類」視作一種模糊的類別，而需要通過文學和藝術來完成其定義。 (Zoe)

Awards/获奖情况：「Lynn Festa完成了一部後人文主義的經典──然而卻同時帶給我們一個全新的且更嚴謹的人性定義。」

──Jayne Elizabeth Lewis，加州大學英語文學系教授，著有《空氣的樣貌：1660-1794英國小說中的文學氛圍》

「本書透過批判性地檢視了像是鳥類、昆蟲、繪畫、科學的版畫、謎語、寓言和《魯賓遜漂流記》中的島嶼等這類東西，從一種截然不同的視角，提出對於人性的定義，其企圖宏大且具有說服力。本書對於18世紀的生態主義批評(註)和環境人文主義批評看法，既深入淺出且具有開創性。」

──Helen Thompson，著有《虛構的事物：經驗主義、粒子和小說》（賓州大學）

註：生態主義批評(Ecocriticism) 是一種文學和文化批評理論，乃始於20世紀90年代文學批評界的新思潮，該理論關注自然(物理環境)與文學以及文化之間的關係，從跨學科的角度研究文學和環境，在歐美尤其是美國文學界尤為盛行。

"Fiction Without Humanity is a profound book that tenders as many pleasures as Pope or Swift as it dances between empirical minima (fleas, flies, personal pronouns, unmatched shoes) and concepts and questions that remain urgent today: Just what makes a thing count as human? How does literary form participate in this accounting? What, specifically, does literature do to, with, for us humans? Lynn Festa has written a posthumanist classic--albeit one that returns us to a new and more demanding humanity."--Jayne Lewis, author of Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794

About the Author/作者介绍： 林恩·費斯塔（Lynn Festa）是羅格斯大學（Rutgers University）的英語副教授，著有Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France.。

Lynn Festa is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France.

Format:HARDCOVER

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