The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

by Paul Baggett (Contribution by), Paul Crumbley (Contribution by), Daniel Dufournaud (Contribution by), Ingemar Haag (Contribution by), Ryan Hediger (Contribution by)

Overview

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. This collection focuses on that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts as well as more recent naturalistic-oriented authors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666915709
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Series:	Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Karin M. Danielsson is associate professor in English at Mälardalen University.

Kenneth K. Brandt is professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Section I: Other Species

Chapter 1. The Outer Animals: Non-Othered Nonhumans in McTeague

Karin M. Danielsson

Chapter 2: Jack London and the Perils of Human Exceptionalism—or Jack London’s Call for Species Interdependence

Paul Crumbley

Chapter 3: The Social Contract and Human-Animal Equality in Dreiser’s “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers”

Patti Luedecke

Chapter 4: Extinction, Genocide, and Atomic Anxiety: Storks in Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro

Lisa Tyler

Section II: Land and Sea

Chapter 5: Environment, Emotion, and the Individual in “The Open Boat”

Rob Welch

Chapter 6: Anthropomorphism Reconsidered: Nature Faking in Jack London’s “All Gold Canyon”

Paul Baggett

Chapter 7: “Love” of the Land as Agrilogistic Tragedy in O Pioneers!: Hazards while Embracing Nonhumans

Ryan Hediger

Section III: Cityscapes and Pseudonature

Chapter 8: Wharton’s Architectural Imagination in The House of Mirth

Daniel Dufournaud

Chapter 9: Pseudonature in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

Jency Wilson

Chapter 10: Naturalism’s Nonhuman Streets: Food and Waste in Ann Petry’s Writing

Cara Erdheim Kilgallen

Section IV: Image, Object, Text

Chapter 11: Between Word and Image: Western Landscape and Photographic Rhetoric in Stephen Crane’s Prose Writing

Francesca Razzi

Chapter 12: “The Cruel Radiance of What Is”: The Reality of Things in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Markku Lehtimäki

Section V: Last Things

Chapter 13 Trouble with Human-Nonhuman Distinctions in Dreiser, London, Hamilton, and Dick

Kenneth K. Brandt

Chapter 14: Davids and Goliaths: Last Days Reconciliation Between Humans and Nonhumans in Don DeLillo’s Zero K and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos

Ingemar Haag

Chapter 15: Writing What Remains: Naturalism and the Nonhuman after Nature in Sheri S. Tepper’s Plague of Angels Trilogy

Stephanie Studzinski

Index

About the Contributors

Editorial Reviews

In this volume, scholars from Italy, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and the U.S.A. investigate works of American literary naturalism through the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment. By analyzing the Nonhuman elements surrounding human subjects in classic and contemporary naturalist writers, the contributors create fresh insights into the links between theory and criticism and the global ecological crisis.

Susan Nuernberg

This book makes a substantial contribution to ecocritical and animal studies scholarship. Engaging with (post)humanism, literary aesthetics, and cultural theory, the collection offers fascinating analyses of relationships between humans and Nature—wild and cultivated, constructed, imagined, represented, and speculative. These fresh, original readings demonstrate, more than ever, the continued relevance of American literary naturalism as a field for expanding conversations about humans’ interaction with the environment, human agency, ethics, and aesthetics.

Anita Duneer

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism is an illuminating and provocative collection that will stimulate readers to expand their humancentric perspectives to understand the role of the nonhuman—animals, but also entities, processes, and agricultural and urban spaces—in literary naturalism and also its heir, science fiction.

Keith Newlin

Literary naturalism—especially in the American tradition—is a useful mode to explore the significance of the nonhuman, since it can be utilized to focus on the various nonhuman creatures, objects, and natural and created environments that affect human beings. Brandt and Danielsson consider naturalism very broadly, in some instances focusing on authors readers might not immediately connect to literary naturalism. Authors addressed in the volume include Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and others. The collection includes 15 essays (plus a helpful introduction cowritten by the editors) authored by an international collection of scholars of American literature who are informed by ecocriticism, animal studies, posthumanism, and cultural materialism. Essays typically rely on sophisticated theoretical positions, but the collection remains accessible and is overall an insightful and provocative exploration of the significance of the nonhuman in American literary naturalism. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews