James Kuzner is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University.

This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'Barbara Correll, Cornell University'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

• Acknowledgements; Preface: Vulnerable Crests of Renaissance Selves; 1: Legacies of Republicanism, Histories of the Self; 2: 'Without Respect of Utility': Precarious Life and the Politics of Edmund Spenser's Legend of Friendship; 3: Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus, Titus, and the Forms of Openness; 4: 'That Transubstantiall solacisme': Andrew Marvell, Linguistic Vulnerability, and the Space of the Subject; 5: Habermas Goes to Hell: Pleasure, Public Reason, and the Republicanism of Paradise Lost; Epilogue: The Futures of Open Subjects; Index.

James Kuzner is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University.

This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'Barbara Correll, Cornell University'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

• Acknowledgements; Preface: Vulnerable Crests of Renaissance Selves; 1: Legacies of Republicanism, Histories of the Self; 2: 'Without Respect of Utility': Precarious Life and the Politics of Edmund Spenser's Legend of Friendship; 3: Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus, Titus, and the Forms of Openness; 4: 'That Transubstantiall solacisme': Andrew Marvell, Linguistic Vulnerability, and the Space of the Subject; 5: Habermas Goes to Hell: Pleasure, Public Reason, and the Republicanism of Paradise Lost; Epilogue: The Futures of Open Subjects; Index.

James Kuzner is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University.

This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'Barbara Correll, Cornell University'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life

• Acknowledgements; Preface: Vulnerable Crests of Renaissance Selves; 1: Legacies of Republicanism, Histories of the Self; 2: 'Without Respect of Utility': Precarious Life and the Politics of Edmund Spenser's Legend of Friendship; 3: Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus, Titus, and the Forms of Openness; 4: 'That Transubstantiall solacisme': Andrew Marvell, Linguistic Vulnerability, and the Space of the Subject; 5: Habermas Goes to Hell: Pleasure, Public Reason, and the Republicanism of Paradise Lost; Epilogue: The Futures of Open Subjects; Index.