Abstract
This essay explores the materiality of air in three forms: Global Winds, Embodied Breath and Nothing. Each of these three representations appears in different source texts, including Shakespeare's King Lear, early modern scientific writings, cartography, meteorology and classical philosophy. Searching for places in which invisible air pushes back against human perceptions and conception, the essay explores what air has to offer early modern ecocritics.
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Notes
For the opposite point, see Walcott (1997).
‘The history of wind and the body is the history of the relationship between change and human being’ (Kuriyama, 1999, 242).
For still another ecological reading of this scene, which I can’t seem to get out of my head, see Mentz (2011).
The OED notes the word entered Spanish via Oviedo and English through Richard Eden's translations of Peter Martyr.
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Mentz, S. A poetics of nothing: Air in the early modern imagination. Postmedieval 4, 30–41 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.42