Anthropofugal Fictions

Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield, where he co-directs the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. He has published widely on the politics of species in contemporary literature and film and co-edited several volumes, including Animal Satire (2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (2021). He is the co-editor, with Susan McHugh and John Miller, of the book series Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsSet off1. Species Dissidence: Brigid Brophy's Pro-animal Forms2. Familiarity: Alice Walker and The Temple of My Familiar3. A Vegan Form of Life: J. M. Coetzee and The Lives of Animals4. Carniveracity: David Foster Wallace's Special Kind of SincerityAnthropofugueNotesBibliographyIndex

Anthropofugal Fictions is the most thorough and adventurous unravelling of anthropocentrism that contemporary literary studies has to offer. In a series of dazzling readings, Robert McKay shows how Brigid Brophy, Alice Walker, J. M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace unpick human essentialism, confronting, resisting or wholly exploding the normative categories of ‘nature’. Far from the proverbial prison-house, language in this book is a fugitive, freeing force: the medium of a new poetics and politics of species.