New Materialist Literary Theory

Critical Conceptions of Literature for the Anthropocene

This collection brings together internationally renowned literary scholars to develop a literary theory for the age of new materialism. It draws on the key concepts of entanglement and speculation i to highlight literature's timeliness and urgency in the Anthropocene.

This edited collection builds on recent strands in philosophy that promote a critical conceptual return to the material world outside human culture. Through the lens of literary analysis and theory, it conceptualizes the potential of New Materialism as a timely mode of critique toward the current human condition and its effect on literature and the present. Organized around the key New Materialist concepts of entanglement and speculation, the chapters by renowned literary scholars and theorists approach literary texts and theory from onto-epistemological and speculative realist perspectives. Both concepts critically bespeak our precarious relation to matter during the Anthropocene. Entanglement analyzes this human inference with the material environment and its consequences, while speculation makes palpable our cognitive limits in grasping these consequences and our continued obligation to try to do so. Literature emerges as a site where entanglement and speculation, as well as their alignment, are intensively presented and negotiated. In highlighting these connections, the chapters in this collection bring entanglement and speculation (theory) together to form a critical literary theory fit for the Anthropocene.

Contributor: Arne De Boever (Contributions by), Marco Caracciolo (Contributions by), Daniela Keller (Contributions by), Cord-Christian Casper (Contributions by), Kerstin Howaldt (Edited by), Kai Merten (Edited by), Kerstin Howaldt (Contributions by), Philipp Erchinger (Contributions by), Grant Hamilton (Contributions by), Birgit Mara Kaiser (Contributions by), Annina Klappert (Contributions by), Evan Gottlieb (Contributions by), Ann-Katrin Preis (Contributions by)

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