Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature : Narrating the War Against Animals

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 O’Key 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, O’Key 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.

Dominic O'Key is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. As of November 2021, he will be Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Bryan Cheyette is Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading. He is the editor or author of ten books, most recently Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2014) and (with Peter Boxall) volume seven of the Oxford History of the Novel in English (on the British and Irish novel, 1940-present) (2016). He reviews contemporary fiction and criticism for the Times Literary Supplement and various newspapers.

Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (2014); Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (2014); Password (2016); and Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict.