New Materialist Literary Theory : Critical Conceptions of Literature for the Anthropocene

This edited collection builds on recent strands in philosophy that promote a critical conceptual return to the material world outside human culture. Through the lens of literary analysis and theory, it conceptualizes the potential of New Materialism as a timely mode of critique toward the current human condition and its effect on literature and the present. Organized around the key New Materialist concepts of entanglement and speculation, the chapters by renowned literary scholars and theorists approach literary texts and theory from onto-epistemological and speculative realist perspectives. Both concepts critically bespeak our precarious relation to matter during the Anthropocene. Entanglement analyzes this human inference with the material environment and its consequences, while speculation makes palpable our cognitive limits in grasping these consequences and our continued obligation to try to do so. Literature emerges as a site where entanglement and speculation, as well as their alignment, are intensively presented and negotiated. In highlighting these connections, the chapters in this collection bring entanglement and speculation (theory) together to form a critical literary theory fit for the Anthropocene.

Evan Gottlieb is Professor of English at Oregon State University, USA.

Arne De Boever is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Director of the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics in the School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, USA.

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University, Belgium. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the environmental humanities, his work explores the forms of experience afforded by narrative in literary fiction and other media (especially video games). Between 2017 and 2022 he led the ERC-funded NARMESH project at Ghent University, which focused on negotiations of the nonhuman in contemporary narrative. He is the author of several books, including most recently Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality (2023) and On Soulsring Worlds: Narrative Complexity, Digital Communities, and Interpretation in Dark Souls and Elden Ring (2024). He received the Barbara and George Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative for his 2022 book Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities. Marco's game scholarship has appeared in Games and Culture, Game Studies, and Eludamos.

Daniela Keller holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Basel, Switzerland.