Writing Animals

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction: Literary Animals

   • Timothy C. Baker

   Pages 1-37

3. The Ape Speaks: Rereading Red Peter in the Twenty-First Century

   • Timothy C. Baker

   Pages 39-74

4. Ladies into Foxes: Narratives of Transformation

   • Timothy C. Baker

   Pages 75-108

5. The Dying Animal

   • Timothy C. Baker

   Pages 109-143

6. The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories

   • Timothy C. Baker

   Pages 145-184

7. Look! A Squirrel!: Animals Writing

   • Timothy C. Baker

   Pages 185-209

8. Back Matter

   Pages 211-239

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This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language and suffering in twenty-first-century fiction and drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches, Baker suggests new opportunities for exploring the centrality of nonhuman animals in recent fiction: writing animal lives leads to new narrative structures and forms of expression. These novels destabilise assumptions about the nature of pain and vulnerability, the burden of literary inheritance, the challenge of writing the Anthropocene, and the relation between text and image. Including both well-known authors and emerging talents, from J.M. Coetzee and Karen Joy Fowler to Sarah Hall, Alexis Wright, and Max Porter, and texts from experimental fiction to work for children, Writing Animals offers an original perspective on both contemporary fiction and the field of literary animal studies.

• Human-animal relations
• Anthropocentric
• Contemporary fiction
• Nonhuman
• Interspecies relations
• Continental philosophy
• J.M. Coetzee

• Department of English and Film Studies University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

  Timothy C. Baker

Timothy C. Baker is Senior Lecturer in Scottish and Contemporary Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community (2009) and Contemporary Scottish Gothic: Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition (2014).

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