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Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture
The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture – although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/reconfiguring-human-nonhuman-posthuman-literature-culture-sanna-karkulehto-aino-kaisa-koistinen-essi-varis/e/10.4324/9780429243042, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Solidarities with the Non/Human, or, Posthumanism in Literature
This volume collects essays written over the last decade by one of the founders and leading figures of the theoretical movement of critical posthumanism. The readings of literary texts gathered here, from Shakespeare, Keats, Camus, Vittorini, Kundera, Haushofer, Atwood, Eagleman, Crace and DeLillo, focus on ‘posthumanist moments’ in which questions of postanthropocentrism and the nonhuman become prominent, are negotiated and ultimately foreclosed. They show how a deconstructively-minded way of reading humanistically-motivated texts can help making these texts relevant for our so-called ‘posthuman times’. In doing so, these critical posthumanist readings demonstrate that literature remains one of the privileged cultural institutions and practices from which solidarities both with and between the human and nonhuman can be formed and negotiated.
Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals
This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by seriously considering the animal presence in texts. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied theoretically informed interdisciplinary perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cut across geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the “animal turn” in the field of literary and cultural studies, this boo...
The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human
The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human defines, conceptualizes, and evaluates the insectile—pertaining to an entomological fascination—in relation to subject formation. The book is driven by a central dynamic between form and formlessness, further staging an investigation of the phenomenon of fascination using Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggesting that the psychodrama of subject formation plays itself out entomologically. The book’s engagement with the insectile—its enactments, cultural dreamwork, fantasy transformations—‘in-forming’ the so-called human subject undertakes a broader deconstruction of said subject and demonstrates the foundational but occluded role o...
Bestial Oblivion
Although war is a heterogeneous assemblage of the human and nonhuman, it nevertheless builds the illusion of human autonomy and singularity. Focusing on war and ecology, a neglected topic in early modern ecocriticism, Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England shows how warfare unsettles ideas of the human, yet ultimately contributes to, and is then perpetuated by, anthropocentrism. Bertram’s study of early modern warfare’s impact on human-animal and human-technology relationships draws upon posthumanist theory, animal studies, and the new materialisms, focusing on responses to the Anglo-Spanish War, the Italian Wars, the Wars of Religion, the colonization of Ireland, and Jacobean “peace.” The monograph examines a wide range of texts—essays, drama, military treatises, paintings, poetry, engravings, war reports, travel narratives—and authors—Erasmus, Machiavelli, Digges, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Coryate, Bacon—to show how an intricate web of perpetual war altered the perception of the physical environment as well as the ideologies and practices establishing what it meant to be human.
Reading Literary Animals
Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing how practices of close reading provoke new ways of thinking about animals and the texts in which they appear. Through investigations of works by Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, and Ted Hughes, among many others, Reading Literary Animals demonstrates the value of distinctively literary animal studies.
The Landscapes of W. H. Auden’s Interwar Poetry
This is the first book-length study foregrounding Auden’s sense of place as a means for enhancing our grasp of this crucial twentieth-century poet. Proposing that Auden had a remarkable spatial sensibility, this book concentrates on his treatment of his homeland England, as well as the North Pennines and Iceland, both of which served as his ‘good’ places, ‘holy’ grounds and sources of topophilic sentiment. The readings draw on the scholarship of humanistic geography, tracing patterns of mental constructs which emerge from spatial experience. In a scholarly but engaging way, this book argues that focusing on Auden’s poetics of place as it emerged and evolved can be instrumental to...
Outside the Anthropological Machine
In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues, starts precisely from the way we relate to our closer companion species. The authors gathered here endeavour to find multiple exit strategies from the anthropocentric paradigms that have bound the human and social sciences. Part I investigates the unexplored margins of human history by re-reading historical events, literary texts, and scientific findings from an animal’s perspective, rather than a human’s. Part II explores different forms of human-animal relationships, putting the emphasis on the institutions, spaces, and discourses that frame our interactions with animals. Part III engages with processes of "translation" that aim to render animals’ experience and perception into human words and visual language.
Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature
Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature identifies and analyses encounters with unexpected, disconcerting, and unsettling aspects of the natural world, as these have been represented across a wide range of literary texts. It includes in‐depth discussion of both familiar and less familiar works from the British, American, and European literary traditions, and from the Classical period to today. The motifs discussed include earthquakes, forests, storms, animals, and oceanic depth, and the writers include Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Aphra Behn, Voltaire, Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, H.G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Proulx. Rich in both close textual analysis and contextual discussion, Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature offers a vivid introduction to several topical approaches to literary‐critical analysis, including ecocriticism, new materialism, affect theory, and human‐animal studies, thereby demonstrating how literature shapes and is shaped by our response to the pressing questions of our time.
Writing the Land, Writing Humanity
The Maya Literary Renaissance is a growing yet little-known literary phenomenon that can redefine our understanding of "literature" universally. By analyzing eight representative texts of this new and vibrant literary movement, the book argues that the texts present literature as a trans-species phenomenon that is not reducible only to human creativity. Based on detailed textual analysis of the literature in both Maya and Spanish as well as first-hand conversations with the writers themselves, the book develops the first conceptual map of how literature constantly emerges from wider creative patterns in nature. This process, defined as literary inhabitation, is explained by synthesizing core Maya cultural concepts with diverse philosophical, literary, anthropological and biological theories. In the context of the Yucatan Peninsula, where the texts come from, literary inhabitation is presented as an integral part of bioregional becoming, the evolution of the Peninsula as a constantly unfolding dialogue.
