Kerstin Howaldt holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Erfurt. Kai Merten is professor of British literary studies at the University of Erfurt. He is the founder of the Erfurt Network on New Materialism (ENNM).

• Chapter 1: Diffracting “stabilized/stabilizing binaries” of Contemporary British Climate-Change TheaterChapter 2: Pastoral Fieldwork: Wordsworth’s LabourChapter 3: At First Blush: New Materialism and Computational Literary StudiesChapter 4: Quicksand, Lispector, and the Volatile Matters of Literary Materialism Chapter 5: Being a/part. Thinking About the Human/Nonhuman RelationshipChapter 6: Resisting Finitude, or The Romantic AnthropoceneChapter 7: At War with the Seasons: Wilfred Owen’s “Exposure” and “Spring Offensive”Chapter 8: W.G. Sebald and the Exploded ViewPart Three: Aligning Entanglement and SpeculationChapter 9: Uncertain Materiality in the NeuronovelChapter 10: Diffracting Birds and Words in Nicholas Royle’s An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017)Chapter 11: How To Get Outside—Assemblages in Speculative Nature Writing

Over the last decade or so, New Materialist philosophies have swept across the humanities and social sciences. Even so, the methodological implications for literary studies remain an open question. In this vivid edited collection, Kerstin Howaldt and Kai Merten present an array of original stabs at that question, summarizing and elaborating on existing insights, while pointing new ways forward.