Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Creatural Fictions : Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature
ISBN: 9781137518118
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Palgrave Macmillan
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;

This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss key texts in the emergent canon of animal narratives, including Franz Kafka's animal stories, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller, and others. The volume is divided into four main sections. Two period-focused sections center on modernism and on late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, while two further sections foreground the more general project of theory building in literary animal studies, examining interconnections among concepts of species, sexuality, gender, and genre. The volume also raises issues that extend beyond the academic community, including ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships and the problems of species loss and diminishing biodiversity.

David Herman is Professor of the Engaged Humanities at Durham University, UK. His previous books include Basic Elements of Narrative and Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind.