Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human

Representations of animality continue to proliferate in various kinds of literary and cultural texts. This pioneering volume explores the critical interface between animal and animality studies, marking out the terrain in relation to twentieth-century literature and film. The range of texts considered here is intentionally broad, answering questions like, how do contemporary writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Terry Tempest Williams, and Indra Sinha help us to think about not only animals but also humans as animals? What kinds of creatures are being constructed by contemporary artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Alexis Rockman, and Michael Pestel? How do ‘animalities’ animate such diverse texts as the poetry of two women publishing under the name of ‘Michael Field’, or an early film by Thomas Edison depicting the electrocution of a circus elephant named Topsy? Connecting these issues to fields as diverse as environmental studies and ecocriticism, queer theory, gender studies, feminist theory, illness and disability studies, postcolonial theory, and biopolitics, the volume also raises further questions about disciplinarity itself, while hoping to inspire further work ‘beyond the human’ in future interdisciplinary scholarship.

• 10 provocative case studies focused on representations and discourses of animals and animality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, art, and film in English
• New work from both internationally renowned and emerging figures in the burgeoning fields of animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism, suggesting innovative and significant new directions to explore
• Broad introduction to the kinds of questions scholars in the humanities have considered in relation to animals and animality