The counterhuman imaginary : earthquakes, lapdogs, and traveling coinage in eighteenth-century literature

**__The Counterhuman Imaginary__** **proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence.** Laura Brown finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginary—an alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order. Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown traces the ways presence and power of the nonhuman—weather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of love—not only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, and affect theory, __The Counterhuman Imaginary__ offers an original repudiation of the centrality of the human to advance an integrative new methodology for reading chaos, fluidity, force, and impossibility in literary culture. Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Introduction: The Counterhuman Imaginary 13 1. Species Intimacies: Lapdogs and Banknotes 35 2. Active Matter, Vital Force: Newton and Defoe 59 3. The Uncreation of the Human: Pope’s Dunciad 83 4. “When Time Shall End”: Poetry of the Lisbon Earthquake 103 5. Storms and Torrents: Swift’s “A City Shower” and Defoe’s The Storm 123 Coda: Just Beyond 143 Index 149 "Studies works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, as well as lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives, and the poetry of the Lisbon earthquake to discover the counterintuitive, "counterhuman" forces of the realms of the other-than-human that lie beyond the simple control of the human imagination"-- Provided by publisher