Yvonne Liebermann - Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

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Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel offers an overview on the growing field of nonhuman studies in relation to Anglophone novels. A selection of established as well as emergent scholars presents their research on various nonhuman agencies in the twenty-first-century novel. This collection is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of the twenty-first-century literature that engages with the nonhuman.

This volume provides an overview over the variety of nonhuman actors that take centre stage in the twenty-first-century novel and the formal changes that the Anthropocene, the digital turn, animal rights movement, and research into plant consciousness have brought to the novel as a form. The selection of texts in this collection reflects the current repertoire of novels that feature nonhuman actors. The volume will, among other things, investigate how the environmental changes and the increasing use of AI technologies have influenced realist modes of writing and also fostered the flourishing of genres like speculative fiction as well as its newly emerging subgenres like the New Weird and Climate Change Fiction (cli-fi), how it makes us embrace new perceptions of life in relation to genetic engineering, and how it forces us to engage with newly emerging political contexts. The texts, themes, and theoretical paradigms interrogated in the volume document the range and complexity of nonhuman actors in the twenty-first-century novel by focusing each on a different kind of nonhuman actor, ranging from animals, trees, and the sea to corpses, clones, and language itself. In discussing thematic and formal features of novels by contemporary writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Shubhangi Swarup, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Richard Powers, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yvonne Owuor, Yann Martel, Ali Smith, and Ian McEwan, the volume also encourages a transnational and transcultural take on the developments of the novel.

As editors of this volume, our gratitude goes first and foremost to the contributors of this collection, who have borne with us through this endeavour and without whose contributions this volume would have remained an idea.

Furthermore, we are greatly indebted to the Philosophical Faculty (Philosophische Fakultt) at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf and the Gesellschaft von Freunden und Frderern der HHU Dsseldorf (GFFU) for their generous support of this project. Equally, we would like to thank the Haus der Universitt for providing us with a space in which we could bring together people and exchange ideas, ultimately leading to the creation of this volume.

Furthermore, we would like to thank the Chair of Anglophone Literatures and Literary Translation at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann, for her advice and encouragement, as well as her team for their assistance and Lucas Mattila for his proof reading.

We are likewise grateful for the help and support we have received from the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Allie Troyanos and Paul Smith, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, recommendations, and insights.