In recent years, many disciplines within the humanities have become increasingly concerned with non-human actors and entities. The environment, animals, machines, objects, weather, and other non-human beings and things have taken center stage to challenge assumptions about what we have traditionally called "the human." Informed by theoretical approaches like posthumanism, the new materialisms, (including Actor Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and similar approaches) ecocriticism, and critical animal studies, such scholarship has until now had no separate and identifiable collective home at an academic press. This series will provide that home, publishing work that shares a concern with the non-human in literary and cultural studies. The series invites single-authored books and essay collections that focus primarily on literary texts, but from an interdisciplinary, theoretically-informed perspective; it will include work that crosses geographical and period boundaries. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
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By Chiara Mengozzi
February 01, 2022
In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species’ arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our being-in-the-world as Homo sapiens, this monograph argues...
By Charles M. Pigott
March 17, 2020
The Maya Literary Renaissance is a growing yet little-known literary phenomenon that can redefine our understanding of "literature" universally. By analyzing eight representative texts of this new and vibrant literary movement, the book argues that the texts present literature as a trans-species ...
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By Brenda Ayres, Sarah Elizabeth Maier
November 27, 2019
Whether a secularized morality, biblical worldview, or unstated set of mores, the Victorian period can and always will be distinguished from those before and after for its pervasive sense of the "proper way" of thinking, speaking, doing, and acting. Animals in literature taught Victorian children ...
By Tony M. Vinci
November 21, 2019
Ghost, Android, Animal challenges the notion that trauma literature functions as a healing agent for victims of severe pain and loss by bringing trauma studies into the orbit of posthumanist thought. Investigating how literary representations of ghosts, androids, and animals engage traumatic ...
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By Brett Gamboa, Lawrence Switzky
November 21, 2019
Floating daggers, enchanted handkerchiefs, supernatural storms, and moving statues have tantalized Shakespeare’s readers and audiences for centuries. The essays in Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance renew attention to non-human ...
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By Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, Jane Spencer
September 11, 2019
Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing ...
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By Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Essi Varis
July 17, 2019
The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and ...
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By Hande Gurses, Irmak Ertuna Howison
February 25, 2019
The landscape of Turkey, with its trees and animals inspires narratives of survival, struggle and escape. Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film, will be the first major study to offer fresh theoretical insight into this landscape, by offering a collection of ...
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By Brenda Ayres
December 04, 2018
Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as a naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They were conscientiously, hegemonically determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves, ...
By Tom Idema
November 08, 2018
Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism develops the theoretical perspective of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction novels by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jeff VanderMeer, in which the human ...
By Myra E. Wright
October 22, 2018
Myra E. Wright takes ecocritical studies on an interdisciplinary turn toward the water with her new research monograph, The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern England. Identifying the lively presence of both literal and metaphorical images of sportfishing in all kinds of early modern writing, this ...
By Benjamin Bertram
June 01, 2018
Although war is a heterogeneous assemblage of the human and nonhuman, it nevertheless builds the illusion of human autonomy and singularity. Focusing on war and ecology, a neglected topic in early modern ecocriticism, Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England shows how ...