Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis

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.

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.

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.