Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature - Narrating the War Against Animals

List of contents

Introduction
1 The war against animals: Reading for creaturely life
2 W. G. Sebald’s creaturely melancholia
3 J. M. Coetzee’s creaturely trouble
4 Mahasweta Devi’s creaturely love
Conclusion: From anthropological machines to creaturely forms

About the author

Dominic O'Key is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. As of November 2021, he will be Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Summary

We are living through a period of planetary crisis, a time in which the mass production and consumption of some animals is made possible by the mass extinction of many others. What is the role of literature in responding to this war against animals? How might literary criticism read for animals?

In Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, Dominic O’Key develops the bold argument that deep attention to literary form enables us to rethink human-animal relations. Through chapters on W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and Mahasweta Devi, as well as close readings of works by Arundhati Roy and Richard Powers, O’Key reveals how literary forms can unsettle the fictions of human supremacy and craft alternative, creaturely forms of relation.

An intervention into both the humanism of literary theory and the representational focus of animal studies, this provocative work makes the case for a new formalism in light of our obligation to fellow creatures.

Additional text

If the modern novel has been a key technology for defining what it means to be human, the ongoing war against animals turns the novel into a war machine. Through a series of acute and theoretically astute readings, Dominic O'Key expertly disassembles that machine. In a field that often confines itself to tracing representations of animals, this book's sustained focus on the affordances of form and the manifold aspects of creatureliness constitutes nothing less than a methodological breakthrough.

Product details

• Authors: Dominic O'Key
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 13.01.2022
• EAN: 9781350189621
• ISBN: 978-1-350-18962-1
• No. of pages: 216
• Series: New Horizons in Contemporary Writing
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > German linguistics / literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German, LITERARY CRITICISM / African, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Nature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Comparative Literature, Postmodernism, Literature: history & criticism, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: post-colonial literature, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Animals and society, Literary studies: postcolonial literature