How Literature Comes to Matter - (New Materialisms) by Sten Pultz Moslund & Marlene Karlsson Marcussen & Martin Karlsson Pedersen (Paperback)

About the Book

Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, this volume shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways.

Book Synopsis

Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, this volume shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within 'the material turn', the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine ways in which new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways just as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman realities.
The collection includes an Afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi.

From the Back Cover

An interdisciplinary encounter between new materialist and object-oriented studies and literary criticism. Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, this volume shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within 'the material turn', the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine ways in which new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways just as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman realities. The collection includes an Afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi. Sten Pultz Moslund is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark Marlene Karlsson Marcussen holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern Denmark where she is currently affiliated as an external lecturer. Martin Karlsson Pedersen holds a Master of Arts in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern Denmark where he is currently affiliated as an external lecturer.

Review Quotes

[How Literature Comes to Matter] is an exciting and often path-breaking look at how literature might contribute to contemporary reflections on the entangled relations between humans and more-than-human material realities. Far from being inert and dead, matter - in all its attendant complexity and glory -turns out to be teeming and writhing with life. In the final analysis, matter matters, perhaps much more than the human.--Vedant Srinivas "Journal of Posthumanism"

About the Author

Sten Pultz Moslund is Associate Profess of Comparative Literature & English Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is co-author of The Postmigrant Condition: New Perspectives on Migration, Multiculturalism and the Arts (Routledge, 2018). He is author of Literature's Sensuous Geographies: Place Matters in Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Migration Literature and Hybridity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Making Use of History in New South African Fiction (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (IB Tauris, 2015).

Marlene Marcussen is Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. She is the author of a number of articles in Danish journals.

Martin Karlsson Pederson is Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern Denmark.