Antonia Szabari is professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. Her interests include early modern literature and political culture, interspecies ethics, plant ontology, and speculative fiction, both old and new. She is the author of Less Rightly Said: Scandals and Readers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2009) and co-author, with Natania Meeker, of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculaive Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book prize.
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Description
Preface ix Introduction: French Agents in the Ottoman Empire 1 1 Big Appetite and Rabelais's Multiracial Empires 29 2 Bird-Man 2, Female Androgyne, and Other Speculative Transformations 60 3 Snake Women of the East: Staging Freedom and Invisible Unfreedoms 89 4 Nicolas de Nicolay's Empire of Ink 121 5 Distancology and Universalizing French Masculinity 160 Coda: Race and Self-Discovery 189 Acknowledgments 197 Notes 199 Works Cited 249 Index 269
An admirable work of scholarship. Agents without Empire offers a multidimensional account of the construction of race in early modern France by addressing how French authors navigate the boundaries of the human.---Rebecca Zorach, Northwestern University Szabari's book will be a welcome addition to early modern studies and will help scholars of race, nation, gender, and early modernity reconsider the very concept of agency.---Todd Reeser, University of Pittsburgh