Introduction : Ourselves Our Renaissance: The Verdancy of Critical Practice

Summary

Abstract

This chapter lays out the rationale for the eco-self, a hybrid entity whose properties are discernible across broad swathes of early modern literature. In brief, the eco-self acknowledges humans’ embedment in the world while simultaneously confirming the necessity of periodically claiming a space apart from it. While ecological discourse has offered a necessary corrective to certain aspects of Enlightenment thought, the time is ripe for revisiting proprietarily human concerns. In undertaking this work, the introduction offers fresh conceptualizations of such key ideas as vulnerability, indistinction, and aesthetics.

Keywords: Atomism; ecocriticism; ecopsychology; indistinction; materialism; WEIRDness

I want to tell the story of the self. The goal is an updated biography of a thriving entity, not an autopsy. Of course, a comprehensive account of the self would require a multi-volume work completed over the course of several decades, so the more modest and manageable focus here is on changing conceptions of personhood in early modern English literature. Tracking these innovations offers fresh insights into the zeitgeist of the period; reciprocally, the relevant changes have the potential to suggest some updates or refinements to current conceptions of personhood. The unique verdancy of critical practice invites diachronic comparisons. That is, literary criticism constitutes a fundamentally ecological endeavor in that it so often works by setting various texts or discourses in play and gauging their confluences and reciprocal effects. In this sense, virtually any text possesses an infinite renewability, a capacity to speak to and for diverseepochs. Perhaps most crucially, while the quotidian experiences of early moderns differed from ours in obvious and important ways, there are some isolable, persisting dimensions of humanness. These are my focus.

Because early modern texts interweave psychological and ecological concerns, they prove especially relevant to defining humanness. In Hamlet (1602), for example, Shakespeare exploits the interdependence of self and world, so that the rot pervading Denmark taints its inhabitants. Specifically, the debased king infects the entire geopolitical state. This interplay of self and world is often rightly assessed as a byproduct of humoral theory, so that it activates a particular conception of humanness, one predicated on porousness or permeability.