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Jennifer I. M. Reid,
Worse Than Beasts: An Anatomy of
Melancholy and
the Literature of Travel
in 17th and 18th Century England
Contexts and Consequences: New Studies in Religion and History
Between the mid-sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the colonial
English came into contact with the people of five continents. In
much of English travel literature, and other literary forms
influenced by these accounts, indigenous peoples emerged in notable
conformity with one another, despite the vast array of social,
ethnic, linguistic and religious differences that characterized the
non-European world of the period. Worse Than Beasts explores the
development of a particular language of negativity pertaining to
non-Europeans in which they were portrayed as subject to the
immoderate indulgence of violence and sex, wild speech, and an
obsession with trinkets and childlike amusement. The exploration
begins and ends in a consideration of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels and its melding of two ostensibly different contemporary
English discourses. The coincidence in Gulliver’s Travels of
classical, medieval and Atlantic era images of non-Europeans, and
the presence of madness as a literary motif, is an entré into
exploring a two-century-long similar association between madness and
foreigners within the English imagination.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Angry Brutes and Men with Horns
Chapter Two: Mad and Foreign “Antipodes”
Chapter Three: The Yahoo in the Mirror
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
“In this strikingly original book, Jennifer Reid takes us on a
journey through identity and alterity in early modern England by
bringing together discourses about madness and non-Europeans. Worse
Than Beasts merges the most intimate investigations of personal
interiority with the most far-flung representations of savage and
exotic humans as they appeared in travel narratives…Jennifer Reid
helps us think in new ways about the recurring colonial thematics of
exploring self and others.” —
David Chidester
“From Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy to Michel Foucault’s
Madness and Civilization, a history of madness and unreason unfolds
under the sign of Western civilization. Jennifer Reid’s Worse Than
Beasts constitutes an important chapter in this history. Her unique
contribution lies in her description and analysis of the travel
accounts and imaginative narratives of Western discoverers and
explorers in the formulation and formation of our modern conceptions
of reason.” —
Charles H. Long
Author
Jennifer I. M. Reid received her Ph. D. from the University of
Ottawa (Canada). She is associate Professor of Religion at the
University of Maine at Farmington. She is author of Myth,
Symbol, and Colonial Encounter: British and Mi’kmaq in Acadia,
1700-1867 (University of Ottawa Press, 1995), and editor
of Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of
Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long (Lexington Press,
2003).
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