The Science of the Heart: Shakespeare, Kames and the Eighteenth-Century Invention of the Human

Abstract

During the 1980s and for much of the 1990s a great deal of intellectual effort was devoted to showing that traditional critical readings of literary texts were based on an uninspected ‘essentialist humanism’. As the principal location of traditional humanist values, Shakespeare in particular was subject to a complete historical, political and theoretical makeover as those values were reappraised and discredited. Shakespeare was, in a sense, dehumanized, at least in the academy. In the early twenty-first century, however, the idea of an essential human nature, either in the living species itself or as encoded by Shakespeare, would seem to be under increasing pressure not so much from literary theory as from science and technology. Computers and biotechnology have both invaded and destabilized our distinct sense of selfhood and eroded the boundaries between human and machine. Literary theory might well feel that contemporary scientific developments simply confirm its own contention that we have entered the posthumanist era. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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