Creaturely Forms In Contemporary Literature

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.

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.

Featuring readings of contemporary utopian poetry and fiction from authors such as Juliana Spahr, Mohsin Hamid, Bong Joon-ho, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lidia Yukavitch, and Cory Doctorow, this book investigates the commons - a form of organisation based on collectivity, communalism and sharing - as a type of transition between capitalist precarity and crisis and anti-capitalist futures. Each of the texts under examination was written in opposition to a particular crisis of the capitalist present - inequality, political representation, mobility, and climate change - and develops a particular mode of utopian 'commoning'. Through its examination of these writers, crises and texts, this book reaffirms the use of utopianism as a tool for generating and representing alternative futures for a world in the midst of ongoing planetary crisis.

Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

On what terms and concepts can we ground the comparative study of Anglophone literatures and cultures around the world today? What, if anything, unites the novels of Witi Ihimaera, the speculative fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, the life-writings by Stuart Hall, and the emerging Anglophone Arab literature by writers like Omar Robert Hamilton? This volume explores the globality of Anglophone fiction both as a conceptual framing and as a literary imaginary. It highlights the diversity of lives and worlds represented in Anglophone writing, as well as the diverse imaginations of transnational connections articulated in it. Featuring a variety of internationally renowned scholars, this book thinks through Anglophone literature not as a problematic legacy of colonial rule or as exoticizing commodity in a global literary marketplace but examines it as an inherently transcultural literary medium. Contributors provide new insights into how it facilitates the articulation of divergent experiences of modernity and the critique of hierarchies and inequalities within, among, and beyond post-colonial societies.

Thomas Pynchon's style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this book employs computational methods from the digital humanities to reveal heretofore unknown stylistic trends over the course of Pynchon's career, as well as challenge critical assumptions regarding foregrounded and supposedly “Pynchonesque” stylistic features: ambiguity/vagueness, acronyms, ellipsis marks, profanity, and archaic stylistics in Mason & Dixon. As the first book-length stylistic or computational stylistic examination of Pynchon's oeuvre, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities provides a groundwork of stylistic experiments and interpretations, with over 60 graphs and tables, presented in a manner in which both technical and non-technical audiences may follow.

Putting forward a new theory of fetishism - alternative fetishism - this book provides an up-to-date examination of the work of Jeanette Winterson, offering fresh perspectives and new insights on the topics of gender, sexuality, and identity in her writing. Combining contemporary theories in psychoanalytical and cultural studies, it proposes that a rethinking of fetishism allows Winterson's works to be brought into sharper critical focus by repositioning fetishism as a daily practice in society. In so doing, it argues that Winterson's work challenges orthodox, normative, and contemporary views of fetishism to reveal her own alternative version. Containing the transcript of an email Q&A with Winterson herself and covering the majority of Winterson's oeuvre, from her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), up to the most recent, Frankissstein (2019), the book is divided into three main chapters that each discuss a particular theme in Winterson's fiction: bodily fetishism, food fetishism, and sexual fetishism. While the book's focus is on Winterson, the theoretical framework it proposes can be applied to other authors and disciplines in the Arts and Humanities, such as theatre and film, offering new ways of thinking about topics such as fetishism, feminism, psychoanalytical theory, postmodernism, gender, and sexuality.