Overview

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which ""nature"" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

Full Product Details

Author:   Louise Economides ,  Laura Shackelford
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.503kg
ISBN:  

9780367360849

ISBN 10:   0367360845
Pages:   268
Publication Date:   19 May 2021
Audience:   College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Introduction: Weird Ecology: VanderMeer’s Anthropocene Fiction Louise Economides and Laura Shackelford Node 1: More-than-Human Traces and Symbiotic Monsters – A Posthumanist Politics for the Anthropocene Era? Chapter 1: Home on the Strange: The Queering of Place in VanderMeer’s Borne Books Louise Economides Chapter 2: Acceptance and Continuation: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and Hope in the Anthropocene Arwen Spicer Chapter 3: Entangled Care and the Trouble with Making Family in Borne Samuel Gormley Chapter 4: ‘Love Your Monsters:’ Anthropocene Discourse and Green"" Psychoanalysis in Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne and The Strange Bird: A Borne Story Sydney Lane Node 2: Materialist Speculation after Quantum Physics Chapter 5: Microbiology and Microcosms: Ecosystem and the Body in Shriek: An Afterword Octavia Cade Chapter 6: Strange Matters: More-than-Human Entanglements and Topological Spacetimes Laura Shackelford Chapter 7: Street Smarts for Smart Streets Rob Coley Chapter 8: Tentacular Narrative Webs: Unthinking Humans in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy Dunja M. Mohr Node 3: Aesthetics of Perception and Genre Sense; or Politics Made Perceptible Chapter 9: Genre Tentacular: Area X and the Southern Neogothic Lee Rozelle Chapter 10: ‘Another World, another life:’ Humans, Monsters, and Politics in Predator: South China Sea Benjamin J. Robertson Chapter 11: Can You Describe Its Form? Annihilation and Cinematic Adaptation Cameron Kunzelman Chapter 12: Love in the Time of the Anthropocene: A Conversation Between Alison Sperling and Jeff VanderMeer Alison Sperling"

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Author Information

Louise Economides is a professor of English and director of the Literature and the Environment program at the University of Montana, Missoula. Laura Shackelford is Associate Professor of English and founding Director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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