{"product_id":"the-equality-of-flesh-materialism-and-human-commonality-in-early-modern-culture-hardcover","title":"The Equality of Flesh: Materialism and Human Commonality in Early Modern Culture - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eBrent Dawson\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Equality of Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism.\u003c\/b\u003e While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some--like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton--challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others--like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac--offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, \u003ci\u003e The Equality of Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBrent Dawson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon. His work has been published in the journals \u003ci\u003eELH\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNew Literary History\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eRenaissance Drama\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 252\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0.69 x 9 x 6 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e June 15, 2024\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Books by splitShops","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42696786837600,"sku":"9781501775659","price":107.91,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0598\/1922\/9280\/files\/9ad4c7cad85c4d643d55fe0dc64c563c.webp?v=1775830074","url":"https:\/\/bijoucc.myshopify.com\/products\/the-equality-of-flesh-materialism-and-human-commonality-in-early-modern-culture-hardcover","provider":"CARIBBEAN CONNECT","version":"1.0","type":"link"}