Novel Creatures

Hilary Thompson is Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College, USA. She teaches and publishes on contemporary literature, particularly on questions of the animal and globalization. Her work appears most recently in the volumes The City Since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television and Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Shared Catastrophe and the Call of the Creaturely1 Trials by Water: Aquatic Landscapes, Questionable Sacrifices in Yann Martel and Linda Hogan2 Ringing in Animals and Eras: At the Circus with Sara Gruen and Angela Carter3 From Farm to Fable: Harvesting Humans in J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Michel Faber4 Dwelling in the Future: Human-Animal Apocalypses in Indra Sinha and Barbara GowdyCoda: Tania James’s Millennial ElephantWorks CitedIndex

Novel Creatures is at once a course in applied socio-political philosophy and a novel in itself. Through the course of its four chapters, I felt as if I had read the ten novels explored and met each cast of characters. Through the lenses of Agamben, Benjamin, Kafka, I achieved an embodied sense of knowing what a post-historical state of human/animal hybridity may achieve.-- Dawnja Burris, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, The New School