Description

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Diffracting “stabilized/stabilizing binaries” of Contemporary British Climate-Change Theater

Chapter 2: Pastoral Fieldwork: Wordsworth’s Labour

Chapter 3: At First Blush: New Materialism and Computational Literary Studies

Chapter 4: Quicksand, Lispector, and the Volatile Matters of Literary Materialism

Chapter 5: Being a/part. Thinking About the Human/Nonhuman Relationship

Chapter 6: Resisting Finitude, or The Romantic Anthropocene

Chapter 7: At War with the Seasons: Wilfred Owen’s “Exposure” and “Spring Offensive”

Chapter 8: W.G. Sebald and the Exploded View

Part Three: Aligning Entanglement and Speculation

Chapter 9: Uncertain Materiality in the Neuronovel

Chapter 10: Diffracting Birds and Words in Nicholas Royle’s An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017)

Chapter 11: How To Get Outside—Assemblages in Speculative Nature Writing

Product details

Published 17 Apr 2024
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 244
ISBN 9781666929126
Imprint Lexington Books
Illustrations 4 BW Illustrations, 1 Table
Dimensions 237 x 158 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Kerstin Howaldt

Anthology Editor

Kai Merten

Contributor

Kerstin Howaldt

Contributor

Grant Hamilton

Contributor

Annina Klappert

Contributor

Evan Gottlieb

Contributor

Arne De Boever

Contributor

Daniela Keller

Related Titles

Get 30% off in the May sale - for one week only

Environment: Staging