Overview

This book traces a radical politics of species across the work of four significant Anglophone authors of the late twentieth century: Brigid Brophy, Alice Walker, J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace. Presenting an exciting and original perspective, Robert McKay argues that these literary figures tell anthropofugal stories, in which a tendency towards animals coincides with a desire to flee from humanity. Their writing disavows allegiance to humanity's various guises and ideals, dismissing human distinctiveness and disturbing human privilege to reimagine life with so-called animals. While deeply grounded in the practice of literary close reading, Anthropofugal Fictions is also a work of philosophy and theory that shows how doubts about species identity lie at the heart of live debates about gender, sexuality, race and ethics. It is a challenging and provocative account of what it means not to be human, and of living amongst animals without species difference as a legitimation of one's actions.

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9781399551854

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Reviews

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. -- Anat Pick, Queen Mary, University of London

Author Information

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.

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