Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel

Yvonne Liebermann is Lecturer and Research Assistant at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Germany. She is currently completing a book Latency and Memory in Contemporary Anglophone Literature. She has written articles in the field of contemporary literature, which have been published in peer-reviewed journals including European Journal of English Studies and Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, together with Birgit Neumann. Judith Rahn is Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, Germany. She is currently finishing her book Exploring Posthuman Life in Contemporary Fiction and is co-editor of the special issue Afrofuturism’s Transcultural Trajectories (2020, with Eva U. Pirker). She is author of (Re-)Negotiating Black Posthumanism – The Precarity of Race in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon (2019).Bettina Burger is Lecturer in Postcolonial and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Duesseldorf, Germany. She has previously organised a successful conference on the topic of Nonhuman Agency in Anglophone Literatures. Her publications include contributions to the Literary Encyclopedia and an article on challenges to Western science in Nnedi Okorafor’s Africanfuturist fiction.

• 1. Introduction: Narrating the Nonhuman.- Section I: Nonhuman Poetics: Agency of Literary Forms.- 2. Forms of Agency, Agency of Forms: Reading and Teaching More-than-Human Fictions.- 3. Nonhuman Agencies in and of Literature.- 4. Deontologising the Nonhuman: Arthur Gordon Pym, Contemporary Literature, and the Limits of the Human.-Section II: Negotiating the Human in the Light of the Nonhuman.- 5. Anthropogenesis: Ian McEwan’s Fictions of the Human.- 6. Arctic Snowmobilities: Encounters with Sled Dogs in Gary Paulsen’s Winterdance.- 7. Reframing the Nonhuman: Grievability and the Value of Life in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.- 8. Hopeless Necromantics: Decomposition and Transcorporeal Love in Jim Crace’s Being Dead.- Section III: Imagining Biocentric Communities.- 9. The Gender Politics of Trees.- 10. “Mycorrhizal Multiplicities”: Mapping Collective Agency in Powers’s The Overstory.- 11. The Climate Crisisand Affective Nonhuman Encounters: Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017).- 12. Postcolonial Fictions of the Anthropocene: Tracing Nonhuman Agency in Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing.- Section IV: Negotiating Reality: Approaching the Nonhuman’s Inescapable Alterity.- 13. Cthulhu Calling: Weird Intimacy and Estrangement in the Anthropocene.- 14. “Just a Surface”: Anamorphic Perspective and Nonhuman Narration in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird.- 15. “All Life Matters, or None does” – Connecting Human and Nonhuman Worlds in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Tribe Series.