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.

Unlike many recent studies of animals in fiction it does not argue that literary depictions can help readers understand or empathise with nonhuman animals more fully, instead demonstrating that such depictions of interspecies relations can radically destabilize assumptions about the nature of language and narrative Draws on a wide range of theory and criticism, including continental philosophy, anthropology, affect theory, feminist posthumanism, and more Offers new opportunities to see not only the centrality of nonhuman animals to contemporary fiction, but how writing animal lives changes the nature of the text itself

Autorentext

Timothy C. Baker is Senior Lecturer in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (2009) and Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition (2014).

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Literary Animals.- 2. The Ape Speaks: Rereading Red Peter in the Twenty-First Century.- 3. Ladies into Foxes: Narratives of Transformation.- 4. The Dying Animal.- 5. The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories.- 6. Look! A Squirrel!: Animals Writing.