Bringing together research on Shakespeare, biosemiotics, ecocriticism, epigenetics, and actor network theory, this work explores the space between nature and narrative — seeking to understand how human bodies are stories told in the emergent language of evolution, and how those bodies became storytellers themselves.
Chapters consider Shakespeare's plays and contemporary works by Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood as evolutionary artefacts that helped shape the human umwelt — the species-specific linguistic habitat humans share in common. Plays are presented alternately as digitally encoded bits of culture, or as bacteria interacting with living organisms in both productive and destructive ways.
