How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction

The book explores how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other, focusing on the study of literature as an underdeveloped field within the material turn. It includes new materialist and object-oriented theory and hands-on analyses and close readings of individual works by diverse writers.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 31 August 2022
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, this volume shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within 'the material turn,' the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine ways in which new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways just as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman realities. The collection includes an Afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi.

ISBN-13: 9781474461320