Description
Book SynopsisLiterary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis connects insights from the field of literary animal studies with the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation, and features considerations of new interventions by literature in relation to these pressing questions and debates. This volume informs academic debates in terms of how nonhuman animals figure in our cultural imagination of topics such as climate change, extinction, animal otherness, the posthuman, and environmental crises. Using a diverse set of methodologies, each chapter presents relevant cases which discuss the various aspects of these interstices. This volume is an intersection between literary animal studies and climate fiction intended as an interdisciplinary intervention that speaks to the global climate debate and is thus relevant across the environmental humanities.
Trade Review“The volume made me wonder about what it means to conduct animal studies scholarship in a changing climate, and whether the emergence of the ‘climate crisis’ as a popular concept might impact on the ways we research, write, and teach.” (Dominic O’Key, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, May 8, 2023)
Table of ContentsNarrating Entangled Vulnerabilities in an Age of Global Crises Part I Climate CrisisHopping, Crawling, Hiding: Creatural Movements on the Path to Climate EmergencyPolar Bears and Butterflies: Allegory, Science, and Experientiality in Climate Change Fiction A Spokesbear for Climate Crisis?: The Role of Zoos in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear Undoing Creation in the Climate Change Apocalypse: Animality and Evolution in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living GodBodies Tell Stories: Race, Animality, and Climate Change in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Part II Extinction Playing Against Extinction: “The Dreaded Comparison” and the Distribution of the Human in Mlima’s Tale Animal Narrators and Resonant Silences in “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang and Sila by Chantal Bilodeau The Climate of Extinction: Resistant Multispecies Communities in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Richard Powers’s The Overstory Do Humans Dream of Disappearing Insects?: Fictional Strategies to Convey the Impact of Insect Loss Part III Posthuman Resurrecting Species Through Robotics: Animal Extinction and Deextinction in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Alien Oceans as Climate Salvation: Finding Hope in Kinship with the Deep Blue UnknownEcocrises and Posthuman-Animal Futures in Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Schoen’s Barsk
