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Birgit Spengler is Professor of American Literature at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. She is the author of two books, Vision, Gender, and Power in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, 1860-1900 (2008) and Literary Spinoffs: Rewriting the Classics - Re-Imagining the Community (2015). Her research focuses, among other things, on articulations of states of exception, bare life, and precarious being in contemporary American literature and other cultural media.
Babette B. Tischleder is Professor of North American Studies and Media Studies at the University of Göttingen. Her books include The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction (2014) and the coedited volume Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age (2015). Her research focuses, among other things, on the ways that critical and creative practices tackle present ecological troubles and our endangered futures.
Frontmatter 1
Contents 7
Introduction: Multispecies Chronotopes- Keywords for Thinking Creatively Beyond the Human 11
Cleveland Select 33
Blood on the Kitchen Table 43
Flowers 53
Arboreal Encounters in Richard Powers's The Overstory 65
The Lives of Trees 91
Skunk 107
"The Citizenry of All Things Within One World": Mary Oliver's Poetic Explorations of Kinship 109
Strange Animals in Stylish Habitats: Marianne Moore's Poetry Revisited 123
The Beetles-Greatest Hits: The Rhythm 'n' Sound of Insects 141
Robert Lowell's Hidden Cats: From Lord Weary's Castle to Dolphin 151
Zoological Encounters 161
Urban Animals 163
Notes on Thoreau's Posthuman Democracy 181
Sacred Pact or Overkill? Human-Bison Relations in North American Mythologies 195
Hands: Transdifferent Encounters between Human and Nonhuman Animals 211
Immanence is Bliss: The Ecological Imagination in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow 225
The Decline of Humanity in a Post-Animal World: The Animal Motif in Cormac McCarthy's The Road 241
Uninvited Collaborations with Nature 255
"Strange Matings" and Cultural Encounters: Octavia Butler's Fiction as "Companion Species" to Theory 263
More Than Human? Dracula's Monstrosity 277
"Revealing the Wellsprings of Power": An Essay on the Social Function of Humor in "The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story" 291
Empathy with the Animal 303
Martin Usborne's Dogs: On Entangled Empathy in The Silence of Dogs in Cars and Where Hunting Dogs Rest 311
Paws of Courage: The Heroization of Dogs in Contemporary American Culture 321
Acknowledgements 335
Biographical Notes 337