Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
In recent years, many disciplines within the humanities have become increasingly concerned with non-human actors and entities. The environment, animals, machines, objects, weather, and other non-human beings and things have taken center stage to challenge assumptions about what we have traditionally called "the human." Informed by theoretical approaches like posthumanism, the new materialisms, (including Actor Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and similar approaches) ecocriticism, and critical animal studies, such scholarship has until now had no separate and identifiable collective home at an academic press. This series will provide that home, publishing work that shares a concern with the non-human in literary and cultural studies. The series invites single-authored books and essay collections that focus primarily on literary texts, but from an interdisciplinary, theoretically-informed perspective; it will include work that crosses geographical and period boundaries. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation
1st Edition
Edited
By Kate Foster, Molly Crozier
September 29, 2025
Automation is everywhere: in the supermarket, in home appliances, and on our commutes. While we worry about what automation means for human autonomy now, human societies have long wondered about their replacement by machines. The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture explores the ...
Contemporary Visual Poetry: Women Writing the Posthuman
1st Edition
By Fiona Becket
September 14, 2025
This book examines contemporary visual poetry and how conceptual writing, poem-objects, and computational texts shape a posthumanist understanding that is “situated”. First, the eye is theorised with respect to ethical understanding. When visual poets reclaim vision, visual poetics becomes a ...
Mapping the Posthuman
1st Edition
Edited
By Grant Hamilton, Carolyn Lau
May 26, 2025
This book works to delineate some of the major routes by which science and art intersect. Structured according to the origin myths of the posthuman that continue to shape the idea of the human in our technological modernity, this volume gives space to narratives of alter-modernity that resonate ...
The Monarch and the (Non)-Human in Literature and Cinema: Western and Global Perspectives
1st Edition
Edited
By Nizar Zouidi
May 05, 2025
This collection studies the representations of the character of the monarch in literature and cinema. Being a person, an institution, a character archetype and a narrative role, the characters of the monarch and other royal or regal characters oscillate between humanity and the non-human. As such, ...
Natural and Artificial Bodies in Early Modern England: Literature, Natural Philosophy, Objects
1st Edition
By Alvin Snider
November 28, 2024
This book brings contemporary ways of reconceptualizing the human relationship to things into conversation with seventeenth-century writing, exploring how the literature of the period intersected with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter and how human beings might ...
Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature
1st Edition
By Philip Armstrong
November 06, 2024
Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature identifies and analyses encounters with unexpected, disconcerting, and unsettling aspects of the natural world, as these have been represented across a wide range of literary texts. It includes in‑depth discussion of both familiar and less familiar works ...
Entangled Fictions: Nonhuman Animals in an Indian World
1st Edition
By Suvadip Sinha
May 27, 2024
Entangled Fictions: Nonhuman Animals in an Indian World studies the ethical and affective relationships between human and nonhuman animals in Indian fictional worlds. While drawing upon existing theoretical and philosophical texts with nonhumanist underpinnings, Entangled Fictions argues that the ...
Futures of the Human Subject: Technical Mediation, Foucault and Science Fiction
1st Edition
By Sławomir Kozioł
May 27, 2024
Futures of the Human Subject focuses on the representation of the effects of technology use on human subjectivity in several recent near-future science fiction novels. Sharing the idea that human subjects are constructed in the world in which they exist, this volume inscribes itself in the wider ...
Representing (Post)Human Enhancement Technologies in Twenty-First Century US Fiction
1st Edition
By Carmen Laguarta-Bueno
May 27, 2024
This work studies three twenty-first century novels by Richard Powers, Dave Eggers and Don DeLillo as representative of a new trend of US fiction concerned with the topic of the technological augmentation of the human condition. The different chapters provide, from the double perspective of the ...
The Landscapes of W. H. Auden’s Interwar Poetry: Roots and Routes
1st Edition
By Ladislav Vít
September 25, 2023
This is the first book-length study foregrounding Auden’s sense of place as a means for enhancing our grasp of this crucial twentieth-century poet. Proposing that Auden had a remarkable spatial sensibility, this book concentrates on his treatment of his homeland England, as well as the North ...
Animal Remains
1st Edition
Edited
By Sarah Bezan, Robert McKay
May 31, 2023
The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity’s animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities. But, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, animal ...
Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature: Sovereign Colony
1st Edition
By Nicole A. Jacobs
May 31, 2023
This book examines apian imagery—bees, drones, honey, and the hive—in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary and oral traditions. In England and the New World colonies during a critical period of expansion, the metaphor of this communal society faced unprecedented challenges even as it ...