Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals

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We are living through a period of planetary crisis, a time in which the mass production and consumption of some animals is made possible by the mass extinction of many others. What is the role of literature in responding to this war against animals How might literary criticism read for animals In Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, Dominic OKey develops the bold argument that deep attention to literary form enables us to rethink human-animal relations. Through chapters on W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and Mahasweta Devi, as well as close readings of works by Arundhati Roy and Richard Powers, OKey reveals how literary forms can unsettle the fictions of human supremacy and craft alternative, creaturely forms of relation. An intervention into both the humanism of literary theory and the representational focus of animal studies, this provocative work makes the case for a new formalism in light of our obligation to fellow creatures.

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A richly textured and much needed critical analysis of the anthropocentrism underlying humanist literary discourse. * Animal Studies Journal *
By reading against animal studiess dominant focus on representation, and turning instead to the mechanics of literary form, OKey is able to re-read key texts of contemporary literature in ways that significantly enrich our understanding of what art can do to intervene in creaturely relations across the planet. * Studies in the Novel *
By bringing the fields of comparative literature and animal studies into a productive dialogue with each other, Creaturely Forms argues convincingly in favour of acknowledging the importance of textual animals as serious, interventionist subjects of literary inquiry in the contexts of global environmental degradation. * Humanimalia *
This important study not only enhances our understanding of key contemporary writers in relation to the ongoing war against animals, but offers new insights to the role of literature in constructing ideas of the human and the creaturely. OKeys emphasis on form, rather than representation, is an essential intervention in current animal studies, and will be of interest to many readers. * Timothy C. Baker, Senior Lecturer in Scottish and Contemporary Literature, University of Aberdeen, UK *
A groundbreaking contribution, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature identifies how the formal choices of major figures in world literature today serve as inspiration and guides for the decolonizing work of literary animal studies and ecocriticism. * Susan McHugh, Professor of English at the University of New England, USA *
If the modern novel has been a key technology for defining what it means to be human, the ongoing war against animals turns the novel into a war machine. Through a series of acute and theoretically astute readings, Dominic O'Key expertly disassembles that machine. In a field that often confines itself to tracing representations of animals, this book's sustained focus on the affordances of form and the manifold aspects of creatureliness constitutes nothing less than a methodological breakthrough. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium *

Author Bio

Dominic O'Ley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. He is currently working on a two-year research project, funded by the AHRC, titled 'Thinking Through Extinction'.