How Literature Comes to Matter

Sten Pultz Moslund is Associate Profess of Comparative Literature & English Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is co-author of The Postmigrant Condition: New Perspectives on Migration, Multiculturalism and the Arts (Routledge, 2018). He is author of Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Place Matters in Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Migration Literature and Hybridity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Making Use of History in New South African Fiction (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (IB Tauris, 2015). Marlene Marcussen is Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. She is the author of a number of articles in Danish journals. Martin Karlsson Pederson is Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark.

• AcknowledgementsForewordI. IntroductionII. Matter-oriented Perspectives on Literary Techniques, Language and Representation1. The Abundance of Things in the Midst of Writing: A Post-Anthropocentric View on Description and Georges Perec’s Still Life/Style Leaf　Marlene Karlsson Marcussen2. Slow Narrative and the Perception of Material FormsMarco CaraccioloIII. Object Intrusions in Subject-Centric Texts3. Aisthetic Realities in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. A Matter-Oriented Reading of Postcolonial LiteratureSten Pultz Moslund4. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’: On the Hostile Nature of ThingsMichael Karlsson Pedersen5. ‘We have nothing to be arrogant about’ – Hans Christian Andersen and Anti-AnthropocentrismTorsten Bøgh Thomsen　IV. Carnal Realities: Lively Flesh in Feminist and Queer Readings6. Feminist New Materialism and Literary Studies: Methodological Meditations on the Tradition of Feminist Literary Criticism and (Post)CritiqueTobias Skiveren7. Djuna Barnes and Queer InterioritiesLaura Oulanne8. Corporeal Creativity and Queer Gaps in TimeKarin SellbergV. Capitalism, Crisis and the Anthropocene9. Putting the Earth to Use: Reading Resources in the End Times (Through Science Fiction) Rune Graulund10. Dry Ontology and Finance Capitalism: An Affective-Material Reading of Financial Crisis Fiction Martin Karlsson Pedersen11. The New Work of Art in the Age of Capitalist Realism: Materiality/ Aura/ ApocalypseMaurizia BoscagliVI. Afterword 12. Woodenness: The (Palm) Heart of The MatterTimothy MortonNotes on ContributorsIndex.

[How Literature Comes to Matter] is an exciting and often path-breaking look at how literature might contribute to contemporary reflections on the entangled relations between humans and more-than-human material realities. Far from being inert and dead, matter – in all its attendant complexity and glory –turns out to be teeming and writhing with life. In the final analysis, matter matters, perhaps much more than the human.