Books in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series

This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe¿s ¿Murders in the Rue Morgue¿ (1841), then detective fiction¿s very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form.

Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis connects insights from the field of literary animal studies with the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation, and features considerations of new interventions by literature in relation to these pressing questions and debates. This volume informs academic debates in terms of how nonhuman animals figure in our cultural imagination of topics such as climate change, extinction, animal otherness, the posthuman, and environmental crises. Using a diverse set of methodologies, each chapter presents relevant cases which discuss the various aspects of these interstices. This volume is an intersection between literary animal studies and climate fiction intended as an interdisciplinary intervention that speaks to the global climate debate and is thus relevant across the environmental humanities.

Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity examines literary depictions of slaughterhouses from the development of the industrial abattoir in the late nineteenth century to today. The book focuses on how increasing and ongoing isolation and concealment of slaughter from the surrounding society affects readings and depictions of slaughter and abattoirs in literature, and on the degree to which depictions of animals being slaughtered creates an avenue for empathic reactions in the reader or the opportunity for reflections on human-animal relations. Through chapters on abattoir fictions in relation to narrative empathy, anthropomorphism, urban spaces, rural spaces, human identities and horror fiction, Sune Borkfelt contributes to debates in literary animal studies, human-animal studies and beyond.

Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them.

In highlighting animal sounds and their cultural meanings, these novels by authors including Amitav Ghosh, Julia Leigh, Richard Powers, Karen Joy Fowler, Cormac McCarthy, and Han Kang also enrich pressing debates about species extinction, sound pollution, nonhuman communication, and human-animal relations.

Exploring the dark side of animal nature and the 'otherness' of animals as viewed by humans, and employing cutting-edge theory on non-human animals, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, this book takes the Gothic genre into new territory.

The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light presents the latest research in animal perception and cognition in the context of rhetorical theory.

This collection of essays centers on literary representations of meat-eating, bringing aesthetic questions into dialogue with more established research on the ethics and politics of meat.

To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory.

Human-animal relationships are conditioned by our imaginative shapings of other animals, and by our sense of distinction from them, and Other Animals opens out how fictional animal forms and tropes respond to, participate in, or challenge the ways animals' lives are lived out in consequence of human imaginings of them.

This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals.

This book is a compact study of Kafka's inimitable literary style, animals, and ecological thought-his nonhuman form-that proceeds through original close readings of Kafka's oeuvre.

Animals in Irish Literature and Culture spans the early modern period to the present, exploring colonial, post-colonial, and globalized manifestations of Ireland as country and state as well as the human animal and non-human animal migrations that challenge a variety of literal and cultural borders.

Exploring the dark side of animal nature and the 'otherness' of animals as viewed by humans, and employing cutting-edge theory on non-human animals, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, this book takes the Gothic genre into new territory.

The author of 'The Tyger' and 'The Lamb' was equally struck by the 'beastliness' and the beauty of the animal kingdom, the utter otherness of animal subjectivity and the meaningful relationships between humans and other creatures.

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger¿s biting monitor, Hachik¿ and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy¿s gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means ofconstructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination.

Through a series of close readings, and by paying close attention to issues of sound, rhythm, simile, metaphor, and image, it explores how poetry cultivates a special openness towards animal others. The thinking behind this book is inspired by J.

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts.

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars working in animal studies and critical animal studies, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture shows how the experience of being vegan, and the conditions of thought fostered by veganism, pose new questions for work across multiple disciplines.

This collection of essays centers on literary representations of meat-eating, bringing aesthetic questions into dialogue with more established research on the ethics and politics of meat.

Animal Visions considers how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthumanist dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species.

Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds.

While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger¿s biting monitor, Hachik¿ and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy¿s gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination.

This collection includes twelve provocative essays from a diverse group of international scholars, who utilize a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze "real" and "representational" animals that stand out as culturally significant to Victorian literature and culture.

This collection of essays offers multifaceted explorations of animal encounters in a range of philosophical, cultural, literary, and historical contexts.