Description
Book SynopsisInterrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises asks whether literary works that interrogate and alter the terms of human-nonhuman relations can point to new, more sustainable ways forward. Bringing insights from the field of literary animal studies, a diverse and international group of scholars examine literary contributions to the ecological framing of human-nonhuman relationships. Collectively, the contributors to this edited collection contemplate the role of literature in the setting of environmental agendas and in determining humanity’s path forward in the company of nonhuman others.
Trade Review“Ranging from the nineteenth century to contemporary climate change fiction and embracing a variety of literary genres and geographical contexts, the essays in this collection offer a wide gamut of perspectives on how literature may probe nonhuman ways of being in the world and question anthropocentric assumptions. The collection positions debates on literature and climate change within a longer history of Western thinking on the nonhuman—a provocative and valuable move in today's scholarly landscape. Engaging with themes including animal experience, nuclear anxieties, and environmental activism, the authors convincingly show that literature is no mere illustration of posthumanist ideas but that its very form can perform philosophical tensions and positions in transformative ways.”
-- Marco Caracciolo, Ghent University
Table of ContentsPart I: Past Narratives of Environmental Crisis
Chapter 1: The Peculiar Associations of Melville’s “Encantadas”: Nature and National Allegory
Kristen R. Egan
Chapter 2: Making a Difference? Richard Jefferies’ After London, E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” and Climate Change Fiction
Adrian Tait
Chapter 3: Stories of “Being-with” Other Animals: A Case of Humans and Horses
Mary Trachsel
Part II: Witnessing
Chapter 4: Animal Texts: How Coyote America and American Wolf Embody the Literary Animal Through A Cross-Disciplinary Approach
Lauren E. Perry
Chapter 5: Beautiful and Sublime: Embracing Otherness in Mary Oliver’s Ecopoetry
Anastasia Cardone
Chapter 6: The Sea’s Witness: Narration, Texturisation and Reader Responsibility in Rachel Carson’s Oceanalia
Lauren O’Mahony
Part 3: Nonhuman Agency/Representation of the Nonhuman
Chapter 7: The Posthuman Return: Transformation through Stillness in Richard Powers’s The Overstory
Owen Harry
Chapter 8: Classifying Monsters
Vera Veldhuizen
Chapter 9: “‘There isn’t Anything that isn’t Political.’ It’s an Expression that Sounds Human, but Everything in Her Voice Indicates that She is Not’: The Nonhuman Subject as Decolonising Trope in Ellen Van Neervan’s ‘Water’” (2014)
Clare Archer-Lean
Part IV: Mutation and Post-Apocalypse
Chapter 10: “We’ve Made Meat for Everyone!:” The Ideology of Distinction and Becoming Flesh in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat
Samantha Hind
Chapter 11: “There would be monsters, some hopeful”: Viral Agencies and Mutational Posthuman Politics in Post-Millennial Science Fiction
Clare Wall
Chapter 12: “A Reign of Community and Harmony”: Envisioning a Multispecies Society in a Post-Nuclear World
Elizabeth Tavella:
