Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman

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

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: