The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape

The contemporary novel is not as silent as we tend to believe, nor does it only attend to human plots and characters. As this book shows, writers in a range of genres have devoted considerable attention to the voices of nonhuman animals, and to the histories and technologies of listening that shape twenty-first-century cultures and environments. In doing so, these multispecies stories illuminate the cultural meanings we attach to creatures like dogs, frogs, whales, chimpanzees, and Tasmanian tigers - not to mention various bird species and even plants. These novels by authors including Amitav Ghosh, Julia Leigh, Richard Powers, Karen Joy Fowler, Cormac McCarthy, and Han Kang also enrich pressing social debates about species extinction, sound pollution, nonhuman communication, and human-animal relations. As we are violently reshaping the planet, they invite us to rethink our own humanity and animality - and to recalibrate how we tell stories about interspecies contact zones and their violent soundscapes.

Dr. Ben De Bruyn teaches English Literature at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He is the co-editor of Literature Now (Edinburgh UP, 2016) and the author of several articles on contemporary fiction and the environmental humanities in journals like Studies in the Novel and Textual Practice.