Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction
Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction

Author: Catherine Parry

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-19

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 331955932X

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This book is about ordinary animals and how they are imagined in twenty-first century fiction. Examining contemporary animal representations and the fraught and potent distinctions humans fashion between themselves and all other animals, it asks how a range of novels make, re-make or un-make traditional conceptions of the creatures we love, admire, eat, vilify and abuse. Other Animals’ detailed readings of horses, an animalised human, a donkey, ants, chickens and chimpanzees develop new critical practices in Literary Animal Studies. They explore the connections between fictional animal representation, narrative form, ethics, and the lives and warm bodies of the real-world creatures that precede and exceed our imagination. Human-animal relationships are conditioned by our imaginative shapings of other animals, and by our sense of distinction from them, and Other Animals opens out how fictional animal forms and tropes respond to, participate in, or challenge the ways animals’ lives are lived out in consequence of human imaginings of them.

Writing Animals
Writing Animals

Author: Timothy C. Baker

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-07

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 3030038807

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This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language and suffering in twenty-first-century fiction and drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches, Baker suggests new opportunities for exploring the centrality of nonhuman animals in recent fiction: writing animal lives leads to new narrative structures and forms of expression. These novels destabilise assumptions about the nature of pain and vulnerability, the burden of literary inheritance, the challenge of writing the Anthropocene, and the relation between text and image. Including both well-known authors and emerging talents, from J.M. Coetzee and Karen Joy Fowler to Sarah Hall, Alexis Wright, and Max Porter, and texts from experimental fiction to work for children, Writing Animals offers an original perspective on both contemporary fiction and the field of literary animal studies.

Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel
Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

Author: Yvonne Liebermann

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-25

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 3030794423

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This book offers an overview on the growing field of nonhuman studies in relation to Anglophone novels. It illuminates the variety of nonhuman actors that take centre stage in the twenty-first-century novel and the formal changes that the Anthropocene, the digital turn, the animal rights movement, and research into plant consciousness have brought to the novel as a form. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of twenty-first-century literature that engages with the nonhuman. The collection investigates how the environmental changes and the increasing use of AI technologies have fostered the flourishing of genres like the New Weird, Climate Fiction, and speculative fiction, how it makes us embrace new perceptions of life in relation to genetic engineering, and how it forces us to engage with newly emerging political contexts.

Twenty-first-century Fiction
Twenty-first-century Fiction

Author: Peter Boxall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1107006910

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"The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century"-- Provided by publisher.

Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction
Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction

Author: Lígia Bezerra

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2022-08-15

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1612497608

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Everyday Consumption in Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Fiction is the first in-depth study to map out the representation of consumption in contemporary Brazilian prose, highlighting how our interactions with commodities connect seemingly disconnected areas of everyday life, such as eating habits, the growth of prosperity theology, and ideas of success and failure. It is also the first text to provide a pluralistic perspective on the representation of consumption in this fiction that moves beyond the concern with aesthetic judgment of culture based on binaries such as good/bad or elevated/degraded that have largely informed criticism on this body of literary work. Current Brazilian fiction provides a variety of perspectives from which to think about our daily interactions with commodities and about how consumption affects us all in subtle ways. Collectively, the narratives analyzed in the book present a wide spectrum of more or less hopeful portrayals of existence in consumer culture, from totalizing dystopia to transformative hope.

Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare
Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare

Author: Michael J. Gilmour

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 3030554309

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This book examines animal welfare themes in fiction, and considers how authors of the last two centuries undermine dominative attitudes toward the nonhuman. Appearing alongside the emerging humane movements of the nineteenth century and beyond is a kind of storytelling sympathetic to protectionist efforts well-described as a literature of protest. Compassion-inclined tales like the Dolittle adventures by Hugh Lofting educate readers on a wide range of ethical questions, empathize with the vulnerable, and envision peaceful coexistence with other species. Memorable characters like Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe, Ivan the gorilla and Louis the trumpeter swan, Hazel and Cheeta, Mr. Bultitude and Doctor Rat do not merely amuse. They are voices from the margins who speak with moral urgency to those with ears to hear. This broad survey of ethical themes in animal fiction highlights the unique contributions creative writers make toward animal welfare efforts.

The Council of Animals
The Council of Animals

Author: Nick McDonell

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Published: 2021-07-20

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 125079904X

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From national bestselling author Nick McDonell, The Council of Animals is a captivating fable for humans of all ages—dreamers and cynics alike—who believe (if nothing else) in the power of timeless storytelling. “‘Now,’ continued the cat, ‘there is nothing more difficult than changing an animal’s mind. But I will say, in case I can change yours: humans are more useful to us outside our bellies than in.’” Perhaps. After The Calamity, the animals thought the humans had managed to do themselves in. But, it turns out, a few are cowering in makeshift villages. So the animals—among them a cat, a dog, a crow, a baboon, a horse, and a bear—have convened to debate whether to help the last human stragglers . . . or to eat them. Rest assured, there is a happy ending. Sort of. Featuring illustrations by Steven Tabbutt

New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel
New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

Author: Sibylle Baumbach

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-12-20

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 3030325989

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This book discusses the complex ways in which the novel offers a vibrant arena for critically engaging with our contemporary world and scrutinises the genre's political, ethical, and aesthetic value. Far-reaching cultural, political, and technological changes during the past two decades have created new contexts for the novel, which have yet to be accounted for in literary studies. Addressing the need for fresh transdisciplinary approaches that explore these developments, the book focuses on the multifaceted responses of the novel to key global challenges, including migration and cosmopolitanism, posthumanism and ecosickness, human and animal rights, affect and biopolitics, human cognition and anxieties of inattention, and the transculturality of terror. By doing so, it testifies to the ongoing cultural relevance of the genre. Lastly, it examines a range of 21st-century Anglophone novels to encourage new critical discourses in literary studies.

The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature
The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature

Author: Susan McHugh

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-25

Total Pages: 631

ISBN-13: 3030397734

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This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.

Creatural Fictions
Creatural Fictions

Author: David Herman

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1137518111

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This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss key texts in the emergent canon of animal narratives, including Franz Kafka's animal stories, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller, and others. The volume is divided into four main sections. Two period-focused sections center on modernism and on late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, while two further sections foreground the more general project of theory building in literary animal studies, examining interconnections among concepts of species, sexuality, gender, and genre. The volume also raises issues that extend beyond the academic community, including ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships and the problems of species loss and diminishing biodiversity.