How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction

• Provides an overview of central postanthropocentric concerns and key concepts within New Materialism and object-oriented ontology
• Illustrates how the material turn and post-anthropocentric theory open new sides to the study of literature, including feminist, queer, postcolonial and anthropocene studies of literature
• Includes hands-on suggestions of how to approach the significance of non-human materialities in literary depictions of the world

Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, this volume shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within ‘the material turn’, the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine ways in which new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways just as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman realities.

The collection includes an Afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi.