| How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters Subjects: Literature Medieval -- History and criticism; Human -- animal relationships in literature; Animals in literature; Human beings in literature; From pet keeping to sky burials, a posthuman and ecocritical interrogation of and challenge to human particularity in medieval texts
Recuperating the Middle Ages as a lost opportunity for decentering humanity, Karl Steel provides a posthuman and ecocritical interrogation of a wide range of medieval texts. Exploring such diverse topics as medieval pet keeping, stories of feral and isolated children, the ecological implications of funeral practices, and the "bare life" of oysters from a variety of disanthropic perspectives, Steel furnishes contemporary posthumanists with overlooked cultural models to challenge human and other supremacies at their roots. By collecting beliefs and practices outside the mainstream of medieval thought, How Not to Make a Human connects contemporary concerns with ecology, animal life, and rethinkings of what it means to be human to uncanny materials that emphasize matters of death, violence, edibility, and vulnerability. Karl Steel is associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and author of How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages . |