Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of bio politics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.
"This is an unusually strong collection of interdisciplinary essays. Barney and Montag have brought together a group of mostly younger or mid-career scholars who pursue questions of economy, biopolitics, and literature in a variety of fascinating ways. There is not another collection quite like it in print."
Robert Markley, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
