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This book explores the past and current traces that cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals used by humans have left in Anglophone literary fiction. In times of accelerated global warming, an acute pandemic, and breakthroughs in bioengineering practices, discussions on how to rethink the relationships to these animals have become as heated as perhaps never before. Livestock and Literature examines what literature has to contribute to these debates. In particular, it draws on counter-narratives to so-called livestock animals' commodification in selected science- and speculative fiction (SF) works from the twenty-first century. These texts imagine 'what if' scenarios where "livestock" practice resistance, transform into biotechnologically modified, postanimal beings, or live in close companionship to humans. Via these three points of access, the study delineates the formal and thematic strategies SF authors apply to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist thought patterns. The aim is to shed light on how these alternative storyworlds expand readers' understanding of the lives of farmed animals; seeking insight into how literature shapes human-animal relationships beyond the page.
List of contents
1. Studying Farm Animal Representations in Twenty-First-Century Science- and Speculative Fiction (SF).- 2. Accessing the Forms and Functions of Farm Animal Narratives: A Hybrid Approach to Literary Animal Studies.- 3. Industrializing the Imagination: Farm Animal Uprisings in Literature from before and after 1900.- 4. (Re-)Imagining Farm Animal Characters in and through Science- and Speculative Fiction.- 5. Eating Well in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013): Biotech Farm Animals and a Hopeful .- 6. "I am Sitting in a Kitchen, Talking to a Sheep": Looking through Postanimal Eyes in Adam Roberts' Bête (2014).- 7. How to Forget the Cages: On the Gains and Limitations to Imagining 'Livestock' in the Laboratory of Literature.
About the author
Liza B. Bauer is the Interim Scientific Manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking and co-speaker of the interdisciplinary research section on Human-Animal Studies at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.
