The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories

Timothy C. Baker

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_5

The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories

Timothy C. Baker^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

Abstract

Beginning with analyses of work by Ben Marcus, Blake Butler, and Barbara Kingsolver, this chapter discusses the way fiction can respond to dramatic shifts in humanity’s place in the world. It contrasts the explicitly American, capitalist perspective on climate change and mass extinction in Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream with the Indigenous perspectives of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, then turns to the fantastic worlds of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and Adam Roberts’s Bête. All four authors suggest the importance of seeing precarity and vulnerability as essential to all creaturely life, and challenge ideas of linear narratives. By examining the way language is shared between creatures and positioning mass suffering and death as a form of relation, they suggest new directions for narrative.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Writing Animals
Subtitle of host publication	Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Publisher	Springer Nature
Pages	145-184
Number of pages	40
ISBN (Print)	978-3-030-03879-3, 978-3-030-03881-6
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_5
Publication status	Published - 2019

Publication series

Name	Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISSN (Print)	2634-6338
ISSN (Electronic)	2634-6346

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_5

Cite this

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The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories

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