Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises(Ecocritical Theory and Practice)

Interrogating 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.

Table of Contents:
Part 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:

About the Author :
Matthias Stephan is lecturer at Aarhus University, coordinator at the Centre for Studies in Otherness, author of Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century, and editor of Otherness: Essays and Studies. Sune Borkfelt is lecturer at Aarhus University and author of Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity.

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.”