Altered Animals, Posthumanism, and Technology in Contemporary Narratives

Introduction: Altered Animals in 20th- and 21st-Century Narratives and Discourse

Part 1. Altered Bodies: Animal Agriculture, Technology, and Genetics

Altered Animals, Altered Verses: Dolly the Sheep and the (Cyber)Pastoral in Contemporary Anglophone Poetry; Happy to be Processed: Virtual Reality and Farmed Animals in Speculative Media; Bioengineered Nonhuman Animals and the Political Status of Pigoons in the MaddAddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood; "I can control them! I made them that way!": Altered Animals in Twentieth-Century Animal B-horror Movies

Part 2. Altered Existence: Animals and their Environments

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Animal Adaptation and Evolution Via Technology in Love, Death & Robots; Neurological Hitchhikers: Altered Animals in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy; Deep Minds to Deep Re-evolution: Roboanimals and Hybrid Ecologies in Daniel Wilson's Robopocalypse Duology; Terraforming Aesthetics: Biomimetic Machines and Planetary Rejuvenation in Horizon: Zero Dawn and Horizon: Forbidden West

Part 3. Altered Boundaries: Animalizing the Human and Humanizing the Animal

"Men, Not Monsters": The Emotional Self in The Lunar Chronicles' Wolf-Human Soldiers; The Altered Neanderthal in Biomedicine, De-extinction Discourse, and James Bradley's Ghost Species; The Kinship of SpeciMen in Nnedi Okorafor's Ecodystopian Narrative, The Book of Phoenix

Part 4. Altered Relationships: Kinship and Companion Species

The Laika Variations: The Space Race, Scientific Research, and Children's Picturebooks; Posthumanism, Trauma, and Multispecies Teams in Children's Films: The Nonhuman Cyborgs Sparky and Sox in Frankenweenie (2012) and Lightyear (2022); Robot Dogs as Dystopian Companions in Television Series; Cyberpunk Strays: Animal Lives in a Human Dystopia

Biography

Monica Millar (née Sousa) holds a PhD in English from York University. She specializes in contemporary science fiction, animal studies, and posthumanism, and has published widely on the topics. She currently teaches courses across several university English departments in Ontario, Canada.

Jerika Sanderson completed her PhD in English at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her dissertation investigated depictions of xenotransplantation and de-extinction in the media, industry, and fiction. Her research focuses on narratives about biotechnology, medicine, and the environment, and she has taught courses on science communication and climate change.