Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

This book offers an overview on the growing field of nonhuman studies in relation to Anglophone novels. It illuminates the variety of nonhuman actors that take centre stage in the twenty-first-century novel and the formal changes that the Anthropocene, the digital turn, the animal rights movement, and research into plant consciousness have brought to the novel as a form. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of twenty-first-century literature that engages with the nonhuman. The collection investigates how the environmental changes and the increasing use of  AI technologies  have fostered the  flourishing  of genres  like the  New Weird, Climate Fiction, and speculative fiction, how it makes us embrace new  perceptions of  life in  relation to  genetic  engineering, and how it forces us to engage with newly emerging political contexts.

Yvonne Liebermann is Lecturer and Research Assistant at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Germany. She is currently completing a bookLatency and Memory in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. She has written articles in the field of contemporary literature, which have been published in peer-reviewed journals includingEuropean Journal of English StudiesandAriel: A Review of International English Literature, together with Birgit Neumann.

Judith Rahnis Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Germany. She is currently finishing her bookExploring Posthuman Life in Contemporary Fiction and is co-editor of the special issueAfrofuturisms Transcultural Trajectories (2020, with Eva U. Pirker). She is author of(Re-)Negotiating Black Posthumanism The Precarity of Race in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon(2019).

Bettina Burger is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Duesseldorf, Germany. She has previously organised a successful conference on the topic of Nonhuman Agency in Anglophone Literatures. Her publications include contributions to theLiterary Encyclopedia and an article on challenges to Western science in Nnedi Okorafors Africanfuturist fiction. 

1. Introduction: Narrating the Nonhuman.- Section I: Nonhuman Poetics: Agency of Literary Forms.- 2. Forms of Agency, Agency of Forms: Reading and Teaching More-than-Human Fictions.- 3. Nonhuman Agencies in and of Literature.- 4. Deontologising the Nonhuman:Arthur Gordon Pym, Contemporary Literature, and the Limits of the Human.-Section II: Negotiating the Human in the Light of the Nonhuman.- 5. Anthropogenesis: Ian McEwans Fictions of the Human.- 6. Arctic Snowmobilities: Encounters with Sled Dogs in Gary PaulsensWinterdance.- 7. Reframing the Nonhuman: Grievability and the Value of Life in Kazuo IshigurosNever Let Me Go.- 8. Hopeless Necromantics: Decomposition and Transcorporeal Love in Jim CracesBeing Dead.- Section III: Imagining Biocentric Communities.- 9. The Gender Politics of Trees.- 10. Mycorrhizal Multiplicities: Mapping Collective Agency in PowerssThe Overstory.- 11. The Climate Crisisand Affective Nonhuman Encounters: Ali SmithsAutumn (2016) and Jon McGregorsReservoir 13 (2017).- 12. Postcolonial Fictions of the Anthropocene: Tracing Nonhuman Agency in Shubhangi SwarupsLatitudes of Longing.- Section IV: Negotiating Reality: Approaching the Nonhumans Inescapable Alterity.- 13. Cthulhu Calling: Weird Intimacy and Estrangement in the Anthropocene.- 14. Just a Surface: Anamorphic Perspective and Nonhuman Narration in Jeff VanderMeersThe Strange Bird.- 15. All Life Matters, or None does Connecting Human and Nonhuman Worlds in Ambelin KwaymullinasThe Tribe Series.