This collection asks whether literary works that interrogate and alter the terms of human-nonhuman relations can point to new, more sustainable ways forward.

Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises asks whether literary works that interrogate and alter the terms of human-nonhuman relations can point to new, more sustainable ways forward. Bringing insights from the field of literary animal studies, a diverse and international group of scholars examine literary contributions to the ecological framing of human-nonhuman relationships. Collectively, the contributors to this edited collection contemplate the role of literature in the setting of environmental agendas and in determining humanity’s path forward in the company of nonhuman others.

Part I: Past Narratives of Environmental Crisis

Chapter 1: The Peculiar Associations of Melville’s “Encantadas”: Nature and National Allegory

Kristen R. Egan

Chapter 2: Making a Difference? Richard Jefferies’ After London, E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” and Climate Change Fiction

Adrian Tait

Chapter 3: Stories of “Being-with” Other Animals: A Case of Humans and Horses

Mary Trachsel

Part II: Witnessing

Chapter 4: Animal Texts: How Coyote America and American Wolf Embody the Literary Animal Through A Cross-Disciplinary Approach

Lauren E. Perry

Chapter 5: Beautiful and Sublime: Embracing Otherness in Mary Oliver’s Ecopoetry

Anastasia Cardone

Chapter 6: The Sea’s Witness: Narration, Texturisation and Reader Responsibility in Rachel Carson’s Oceanalia

Lauren O’Mahony

Part 3: Nonhuman Agency/Representation of the Nonhuman

Chapter 7: The Posthuman Return: Transformation through Stillness in Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Owen Harry

Chapter 8: Classifying Monsters

Vera Veldhuizen

Chapter 9: “‘There isn’t Anything that isn’t Political.’ It’s an Expression that Sounds Human, but Everything in Her Voice Indicates that She is Not’: The Nonhuman Subject as Decolonising Trope in Ellen Van Neervan’s ‘Water’” (2014)

Clare Archer-Lean

Part IV: Mutation and Post-Apocalypse

Chapter 10: “We’ve Made Meat for Everyone!:” The Ideology of Distinction and Becoming Flesh in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat

Samantha Hind

Chapter 11: “There would be monsters, some hopeful”: Viral Agencies and Mutational Posthuman Politics in Post-Millennial Science Fiction

Clare Wall

Chapter 12: “A Reign of Community and Harmony”: Envisioning a Multispecies Society in a Post-Nuclear World

Elizabeth Tavella: