Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature : Narrating the War Against Animals

Through close readings of works by W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and Mahasweta Devi, this book explores how contemporary authors are rethinking the relations between humans and other animals in an age of mass extinction and mass over-production. In doing so, it shows how contemporary literature mediates and contests, but also reimagines, the relations between humans and other animals and makes the case that contemporary literature powerfully challenges the fiction of human exceptionalism.

Introducing the category of the 'creaturely' to denote a shared space between the human and the nonhuman, it draws from theoretical work on the human/animal distinction in Posthumanist and Postcolonial Studies to develop an account of how literature thematically and formally dismantles human exceptionalism. It argues that there are literary texts which turn towards animals in order to imagine less violent ways of being human, calling these texts 'creaturely forms' and arguing that the authors it examines - Sebald, Coetzee and Mahasweta - develop creaturely forms of storytelling.