About this book series
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process
of executing an 'animal turn', questioning the ethical and philosophical
grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal
presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy,
sociology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of
broad, cross-disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the
separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series
publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the 'animal
turn' for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key
marker of humanity's difference from other species; animals may have codes,
calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other
order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the
canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and
interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of
fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this
series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal
studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of
animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an
intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic
engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate
natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in
literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the
discipline's key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series
focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related
discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre
and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural
ephemera) with which English studies now engages.
Series Board: Karl Steel (Brooklyn College); Erica Fudge (Strathclyde); Kevin Hutchings (UNBC); Philip Armstrong (Canterbury); Carrie Rohman (Lafayette); Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
- Electronic ISSN
- 2634-6346
- Print ISSN
- 2634-6338
- Series Editor
-
- Susan McHugh,
- Robert McKay,
- John Miller
Book titles in this series
Abstracted and indexed in
-
- SCOPUS