Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis

Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis connects insights from the field of literary animal studies with the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation, and features considerations of new interventions by literature in relation to these pressing questions and debates. This volume informs academic debates in terms of how nonhuman animals figure in our cultural imagination of topics such as climate change, extinction, animal otherness, the posthuman, and environmental crises. Using a diverse set of methodologies, each chapter presents relevant cases which discuss the various aspects of these interstices. This volume is an intersection between literary animal studies and climate fiction intended as an interdisciplinary intervention that speaks to the global climate debate and is thus relevant across the environmental humanities. Sune Borkfelt lectures at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is author of ReadingSlaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity (2022). Matthias Stephan is associate professor at Aarhus University, coordinator of the Centre for Studies of Otherness, author of Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century, and general editor of Otherness: Essays and Studies.