Bestial Oblivion

Benjamin Bertram is Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, USA. His publications include articles in the Routledge Handbook on Shakespeare and Animals (forthcoming), Modern Philology, English Literature, Exemplaria, and Boundary 2. His first book, The Time is Out of Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England, was published in 2004.

• List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1 Erasmus and the Dung Beetle; or, Human Exceptionalism and Its Discontents; Chapter 2 Machiavelli, Virtù, and the Ecology of War; Chapter 3 Iron Men: Thomas Digges, A Larum for London, and the Elizabethan Cyborg; Chapter 4 War and Resilience: Tamburlaine the Great and the Anglo-Spanish War; Chapter 5 Bestial Oblivion in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Chapter 6 Thomas Coryate, the Lousy Humanist; Chapter 7 Humanity Under Siege: Francis Bacon’s Human Empire and the Capitalocene; Author Index; Subject Index

"Bestial Oblivion captures the messy collisions between humans, animals, and objects in early modern warfare. In venturing onto the battlefield, Bertram’s book marks a refreshing departure from the pastoral environments that have often detained ecocritics. Equipped with the latest insights of the New Materialism and Actor-Network theory, it illumines the new assemblages forged by war and travel in the era that preceded England’s rise as a global super-power."Todd A. Borlik, University of Huddersfield, UK"[...] this ambitious book makes a timely and significant contribution to early modern studies in its enmeshing the discourse of war with contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theory."Rebecca Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania, USA