Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism

Karin M. Danielsson is associate professor in English at Mälardalen University.Kenneth K. Brandt is professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Literary naturalism—especially in the American tradition—is a useful mode to explore the significance of the nonhuman, since it can be utilized to focus on the various nonhuman creatures, objects, and natural and created environments that affect human beings. Brandt and Danielsson consider naturalism very broadly, in some instances focusing on authors readers might not immediately connect to literary naturalism. Authors addressed in the volume include Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and others. The collection includes 15 essays (plus a helpful introduction cowritten by the editors) authored by an international collection of scholars of American literature who are informed by ecocriticism, animal studies, posthumanism, and cultural materialism. Essays typically rely on sophisticated theoretical positions, but the collection remains accessible and is overall an insightful and provocative exploration of the significance of the nonhuman in American literary naturalism. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionSection I: Other Species Chapter 1. The Outer Animals: Non-Othered Nonhumans in McTeague Karin M. DanielssonChapter 2: Jack London and the Perils of Human Exceptionalism—or Jack London’s Call for Species Interdependence Paul CrumbleyChapter 3: The Social Contract and Human-Animal Equality in Dreiser’s “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” Patti LuedeckeChapter 4: Extinction, Genocide, and Atomic Anxiety: Storks in Hemingway’s Under KilimanjaroLisa Tyler Section II: Land and SeaChapter 5: Environment, Emotion, and the Individual in “The Open Boat” Rob WelchChapter 6: Anthropomorphism Reconsidered: Nature Faking in Jack London’s “All Gold Canyon” Paul BaggettChapter 7: “Love” of the Land as Agrilogistic Tragedy in O Pioneers!: Hazards while Embracing Nonhumans Ryan HedigerSection III: Cityscapes and PseudonatureChapter 8: Wharton’s Architectural Imagination in The House of Mirth Daniel DufournaudChapter 9: Pseudonature in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth Jency WilsonChapter 10: Naturalism’s Nonhuman Streets: Food and Waste in Ann Petry’s WritingCara Erdheim KilgallenSection IV: Image, Object, TextChapter 11: Between Word and Image: Western Landscape and Photographic Rhetoric in Stephen Crane’s Prose Writing Francesca RazziChapter 12: “The Cruel Radiance of What Is”: The Reality of Things in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Markku LehtimäkiSection V: Last ThingsChapter 13 Trouble with Human-Nonhuman Distinctions in Dreiser, London, Hamilton, and DickKenneth K. Brandt Chapter 14: Davids and Goliaths: Last Days Reconciliation Between Humans and Nonhumans in Don DeLillo’s Zero K and Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos Ingemar HaagChapter 15: Writing What Remains: Naturalism and the Nonhuman after Nature in Sheri S. Tepper’s Plague of Angels Trilogy Stephanie StudzinskiIndexAbout the Contributors