An Eclectic Bestiary

The essays, poetry, and visual art collected here consider the more-than-human cultures of our multispecies world. At a time when humanity's impact has put our planet's ecosystems into great jeopardy, the book explores literary, sonic, and visual imaginaries that feature encounters between and across a variety of living creatures: beetles and bisons, people and pigeons, trees and spiderwebs, vegetables and violets, orchards and octopi, vampires and tricksters. Offering a wide range of critical and creative contributions to Human Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies and the Nonhuman Turn, the volume seeks to foster new ways of imagining a more »response-able« coexistence on our shared Earth.

Birgit Spengler is Professor of American Literature at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. She is the author of two books, Vision, Gender, and Power in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, 1860-1900 (2008) and Literary Spinoffs: Rewriting the Classics - Re-Imagining the Community (2015). Her research focuses, among other things, on articulations of states of exception, bare life, and precarious being in contemporary American literature and other cultural media.
Babette B. Tischleder is Professor of North American Studies and Media Studies at the University of Göttingen. Her books include The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction (2014) and the coedited volume Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age (2015). Her research focuses, among other things, on the ways that critical and creative practices tackle present ecological troubles and our endangered futures.