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Palgrave Macmillan

Livestock and Literature

Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

  • Presents an approach to reading and studying farm animal narratives
  • Showcases literature's significance in discourse on species extinction
  • Uses science fiction to consider postanimal futures

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (PSAAL)

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About this book

This book explores the past and current traces that cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals used by humans have left in Anglophone literary fiction. In times of accelerated global warming, an acute pandemic, and breakthroughs in bioengineering practices, discussions on how to rethink the relationships to these animals have become as heated as perhaps never before. Livestock and Literature examines what literature has to contribute to these debates. In particular, it draws on counter-narratives to so-called livestock animals’ commodification in selected science- and speculative fiction (SF) works from the twenty-first century. These texts imagine ‘what if’ scenarios where “livestock” practice resistance, transform into biotechnologically modified, postanimal beings, or live in close companionship to humans. Via these three points of access, the study delineates the formal and thematic strategies SF authors apply to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist thought patterns. The aim is to shed light on how these alternative storyworlds expand readers’ understanding of the lives of farmed animals; seeking insight into how literature shapes human-animal relationships beyond the page.

 

Keywords

Table of contents (6 chapters)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Panel on Planetary Thinking, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany

    Liza B. Bauer

About the author

Liza B. Bauer is the Interim Scientific Manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking and co-speaker of the interdisciplinary research section on Human-Animal Studies at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany. 

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