The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism

by Joseph Tabbi

Overview

At a time when scholars in both literary and scientific disciplines are advancing the term posthumanism, this book offers a through-line. Beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and continuing into the post-print, born-digital excursions of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, this literary introduction defines posthumanism and provides a summary account of the key literary and cultural theorists in the field. It embraces humanist refusals from Melville's Bartelby to Thomas Pynchon's authorial surrogation, and more recent evasions and avoidances in the writing of William Gibson, Tom McCarthy, Coleson Whitehead, Jeanette Winterson, and Claire-Louise Bennett. This book also provides close readings of key posthuman fiction, poetry, and conceptual approaches that help ground the discipline.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009256452
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/14/2024
Series:	Cambridge Introductions to Literature
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Joseph Tabbi is an American academic and literary theorist who relocated to the University of Bergen in 2019. He has made significant contributions to the field of experimental American fiction in both print and electronic media. He is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime (1995). He was the first scholar granted access to the William Gaddis archives and is the author of Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis (2015).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: not just another period; 1. Beyond the Two Cultures?; 2. Mary Shelley's modern and Shelley Jackson's postmodern Prometheus; 3. Post-periodization; 4. Posthuman sublime; 5. Ah Bartleby, ah humanities! from transcendentalism to posthumanism; 6. The posthuman imagination in contemporary literature; 7. Posthuman epic in the era of AI; 8. Interlude: N. Katherine Hayles and the cognitive turn in literary posthumanism; 9. Digital posthumanism (on the periphery); Epilogue: platform post(?) pandemic; A collaborative glossary of terms (in process); Works cited; Index.