Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Animals in Posthumanist Thought: An Introduction

   • Krishanu Maiti

   Pages 1-9

3. Contestation Over Species Hierarchy and Categorization

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11

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   2. Can Natural Theology Rethink Its Relationship with Non-human Animals?

      • Peter Ellis

      Pages 13-23

   3. Reassessing the Predator: Representations of Predatory Animals in John Vaillant’s The Tiger and Nate Blakeslee’s The Wolf

      • Monica Sousa

      Pages 25-36

   4. Birds of a Feather: Interspecies Ethics and the Fate of Liminal Companion Animals

      • Josh Hayes

      Pages 37-47

4. Animal (Re)constructions

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 49-49

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   2. Posthuman, Postanimal? Nonhuman Intelligence and Intentionality in Three Short Stories by H. G. Wells

      • Adrian Tait

      Pages 51-60

   3. The Snake Has a Face: Levinas, Mondo, and the Suffering Non-human Animal

      • Aaron McMullan

      Pages 61-74

   4. Bowers of Persuasion: Toward a Posthuman Visual Rhetoric

      • Cynthia Rosenfeld

      Pages 75-86

   5. Jacques Derrida and the Autobiographical (Non-human) Animal: An Analysis of (False) Animal Autobiographies

      • Samantha Allen Wright

      Pages 87-98

5. Interspecies Relationalities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 99-99

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   2. “Neigh Way, Jose”: Posthuman Communication in BoJack Horseman

      • James M. Cochran

      Pages 101-112

   3. Understanding Across Differences in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Les neuf consciences du Malfini and in Dany Laferrière’s Autoportrait de Paris avec Chat

      • Iona Wynter Parks

      Pages 113-126

   4. Human-Animal Relationality: Artistic Travels Through a Subculture’s Imaginations

      • Ninette Rothmüller

      Pages 127-138

   5. The Animal Survives: Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron Intervenes as Survivor of the Industrialized World

      • Lauren Perry

      Pages 139-150

6. Intersectionality-Gender and the Nonhuman

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 151-151

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   2. Into the Woods: The Creaturely and the Queer in 20th Century US American Hunting Narratives

      • Daniel Lanza Rivers

      Pages 153-165

   3. Madness, Femininity, Vegetarianism: Post-anthropocentric Representations in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor

      • Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice

      Pages 167-177

   4. The Bird and Eye: Kinship with Birds as Proto-ecofeminist Discourse of Liberation in George Meredith’s The Egoist

      • Keri Stevenson

      Pages 179-188

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 book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers fresh perspectives on Posthumanist theory, inviting readers to revisit those criteria that created species’ difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating, and highly relevant topics. 


Comprising over 15 chapters by a team of international contributors, this book is divided into four parts:


Contestation over Species Hierarchy and Categorization
Animal (Re)constructions
Interspecies Relationalities
Intersectionality- Animal and Gender


This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of Critical Animal Studies and Environmental Studies. 

• Critical Animal Studies
• Posthumanism
• Human-Animal relationship
• Cultural Studies
• Animal rights and ethics

• Department of English, Panskura Banamali College, Kanakpur, India

  Krishanu Maiti

Krishanu Maiti, Ph.D.,teaches English literature and language at Panskura Banamali College (Autonomous), W.B., India. He wrote his doctoral thesis on representation of animals in D. H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes. His areas of interest include Animal Studies, Posthumanism and Environmental Humanities. He co-edited a volume titled Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics: A Green Critique (2019), published by Rowman & Littlefield, USA. His co-authoredessay on ‘Buddhism and Veganism’ appears in The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies.

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