Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis

by Sune Borkfelt (Editor), Matthias Stephan (Editor)

Overview

Literary 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031110221
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	11/23/2022
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sune Borkfelt lectures at Aarhus University, Denmark. His publications include Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity (2022), as well as articles and book chapters on nonhuman otherness, the naming of nonhuman animals, postcolonial animals, and the ethics of animal product marketing.

Matthias Stephan is associate professor at Aarhus University, coordinator of the Centre for Studies of Otherness, author of Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century, and general editor of Otherness: Essays and Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction Sune Borkfelt and Matthias Stephan.- Part 1: Extinction.- Sara Schotland Do Humans Dream of Disappearing Insects?.- Nathaniel Otjen The Climate of Extinction: Resistant Multispecies Communities in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Richard Powers’s The Overstory.- Abby Schroering Playing Against Extinction: “The Dreaded Comparison” and the Distribution of the Human in Mlima’s Tale.- Brianna Burke Anthropomorphization and Conjoined Extinction in “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang and Sila by Chantal Bilodeau.- Part 2: Climate Crisis.- Emily McAvan “Undoing Creation in the Climate Change Apocalypse: Animality and Evolution in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God”.- Alex Lockwood Hopping, crawling, hiding: creatural movements on the path to climate emergency.- Markku Lehtimaki Polar Bears and Butterflies: Allegory, Science, and Embodiment in Climate Change Fiction.- Elana Santana Bodies Tell Stories: Race, Species, and Climate Change in Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Salvage the Bones.- Anastassiya Adrianova A Spokesbear for Climate Crisis? The Role of Zoos in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear.- Part 3: Posthuman.- Dolly Jørgensen Resurrecting Species through Robotics: Animal Extinction and Deextinction in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.- Aaron Van Neste Alien Oceans as Climate Salvation: Finding Hope in the Deep Blue Unknown.- Daniel Bedggood Ecocrises and Posthuman-Animal Futures in Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Schoen’s Barsk.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Focused on multispecies exposure, precarity and vulnerability, Borkfelt and Stephan’s wide-ranging collection amply demonstrates the strength and vitality of emerging scholarship in the new (post-)humanities. These rich and eclectic essays show that cultural narratives and the study thereof retain a powerful poignancy, even as the waters rise, creatures go extinct and the world catches fire around us.” (Peter Mortensen, Associate Professor of English Literature (Aarhus University), co-editor of Framing the Environmental Humanities (2018))

“This urgent collection makes space for vulnerability in a world that demands steely polarity: the vulnerability of humans as animals in the climate crisis; the vulnerability of nonhuman animals to physical and representational violence; and the vulnerability of literature as a slow form that can nonetheless fuel rebellious change. The very act of reading these pages is to lay ourselves bare, and this is exactly what we need right now.” (Laura Jean McKay, PhD, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of The Animals in That Country)

Editorial Reviews

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)

From the Publisher