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On Fiction and Being a Good Animal - David P. Rando

On Fiction and Being a Good Animal

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
136 Seiten
2026
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-3995-3806-0 (ISBN)
CHF 34,90 inkl. MwSt
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Argues that literature has a special role to play in developing a wishful, visionary, and utopian sensibility for living in a more-than-human world
Instead of making readers into better people, what if fiction could help us to become better animals? On Fiction and Being a Good Animal argues that we should abandon the persistent humanist idea that fiction can produce better people. Instead, we should read and value fiction according to its ability to help us to envision being better animals. Inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, David Rando defines a good animal as one who does not live a life of domination. He argues that when readers approach fiction’s wishful images with non-anthropocentric expectations, we are rewarded by anthropocosmic visions of the world - ones in which humans are in and with the world but no longer at the centre of it.
In compelling readings of Agustina Bazterrica, T. C. Boyle, Leonora Carrington, Marian Engel, Karen Joy Fowler, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, Kenzaburo Oe, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jesmyn Ward, the book explores wishful images that pertain to the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. Readers will discover in this fiction wishful images relating to irreconcilable minds and experiences, human-nonhuman family relationships, love and risk across race and species, and shared vulnerability, communion and pleasure.

David P. Rando is Professor in the Department of English at Trinity University, Texas, USA. He is the author of six books: Artificial Fiction: Imagining Literary Possibility Beyond the Human (2026), On Fiction and Being a Good Animal (2024), Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human–Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction (2023), Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (2022), Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology (2017) and Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century (2011).

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Better People, or Good Animals





Beast, or Baby
Bug, or Brother
Dog, or Sister
Bear, or Lover
Pet, or Guest
Interlude: Zoo, or Ark
Meat, or Mother
Cockroach, or Self
Interlude: Scent, or Secret
Crone, or Goddess
Cockchafer, or Communion
Conclusion: On Having Been a Good Animal
Coda: Nonhuman Fiction


Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag 30.4.2026
Verlagsort Edinburgh
Sprache englisch
Maße 156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ethik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10 1-3995-3806-3 / 1399538063
ISBN-13 978-1-3995-3806-0 / 9781399538060
Zustand Neuware
Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR)
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