REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 40

Nonhuman perspectives are not uncommon in literature: there have been numerous examples throughout literary history of things, animals, plants, super-, sub- or posthuman entities with the ability and power to speak, act and think on their own. In the more recent intellectual context of ecocriticism, posthumanism, thing theory, object-oriented ontology, new materialism, critical animal and critical plant studies, nonhuman perspectives have been prominently employed to decenter the human, to stress ecological interdependencies, to challenge anthropocentric perceptions and values or to imagine a posthuman world in which the human perspective is marginalised.
This collection of essays sets out to explore nonhuman perspective in a historically and generically diverse range of case studies, which offer a critical assessment of the potential of nonhuman perspectives to decenter the human, while simultaneously acknowledging and revaluing the apparently inevitable anthropocentrism of human cultural production.


Inhalt:
Introduction: Voices from a More-Than-Human World (Irmtraud Huber/ Wolfgang Funk)


Nonhuman Worlds and World-Making

Negotiations of Post- and Transhuman Liminalities: Theoretical Conceptions and Literary Anticipations (Jochen Achilles)

Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight Challenges Human Exceptionalism (Julia Boll)

Rain World and Nonhuman Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse (Xaver Boxhammer)

The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn (James Dowthwaite)

Gender Perspectives

Unveiling the sky: Ecofeminist revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (Paul Fagan)

“I feel like becoming the monster he made”: Politics of anger in narratives of nonhuman femme monsters in Stone Blind (2022) and The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home (2020) (Laura Handl)

Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration in Monique Roffey’s Magical Realist Novel The Mermaid of Black Conch (Emily Anderson)

Animal Perspectives

Animal Address – Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry (Irmtraud Huber)

From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray (Raphael Zähringer)

Wily Creatures: Humanity Read through the Eyes of the Fox (Wolfgang Funk)

Material Perspectives

Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) (Sina Schuhmaier)

The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography: Lines of Air in Smith, Wordsworth, and Coleridge (Alexander Scherr)

Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising (Sarah Wegener)


Autor:inneninformation:
Prof. Dr. Irmtraud Huber is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at Universität Konstanz.

Dr. Wolfgang Funk is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.