The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900 [Paperback]

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.Foreword: Priscilla Wald Introduction; Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Carla L. Peterson, and Zita Nunes PART I: RACE AND STOCK 1. Metamateriality and Blood Purity in Cervantes's Alcan? de Toledo; Rachel Burk 2. The Blood of Others: Breeding Plants, Animals, and White People in the Spanish Atlantic; Ruth Hill 3. 'Rude Uncivill Blood': the Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and Milton; Jean Feerick 4. African Blood, Colonial Money, and Respectable Mulatto Heiresses Reforming Eighteenth-Century England; Lyndon Dominique PART II: MORAL CONSTITUTION 5. 'His blood be upon us and upon our children': Medical Theology and the Demise of Jewish Somatic Inferiority in Early Modern England; M. Lindsay Kaplan 6. Sor Juana's Appetite: Body, Mind, and Vitality in 'First Dream'; Anna More 7. Blood and Character in Early African American Literature; Hannah Spahn PART III: MEDICALIZING THE POLITICAL BODY 8. Flowing or pumping? The Blood of the Body Politic in Burton, Harvey, and Hobbes; Robert Appelbaum 9. Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World; Staffan M?ller Wille 10. 'Who Got Bloody?': The Cultural Meaning of Blood during the Civil War and Reconstruction; James Downs 11. Colonial Transfusions: Cuban Bodies and Spanish Loyalty in the Nineteenth Century; David SartoriusThe essays in this volume are motivated by the interconnection between blood and the concept of race. & The Cultural Politics of Blood works to interrogate and often undermine the most commonly accepted cultural histories of blood and race. & This challenging and provocative collection will be of great value to scholars of blood, race, or any related concept within the period covered. (Ariane M. Balizet, Renaissance QulCÍ