Ebook: Animal Writing: Storytelling, Selfhood and the Limits of Empathy

Navigates various literary and philosophical approaches to the representation of the nonhuman

• 5 chapters each explore a different element of the human–nonhuman relationship by placing philosophical theories in dialogue with literary texts
• Encounters fiction writers Yann Martel, Karen Joy Fowler, Han Kang and Jim Crace beside the philosophy of Graham Harman, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida and Roger Caillois
• Pursues underexplored facets of Animal Studies, particularly insects and their relationship to ecofeminism
• Generates a conversation between Animal Studies and scholarship on objects, such as actor network theory and object oriented philosophy
• Explores the implications of the nonhuman for our understanding of aesthetics, ethics and politics

Combining recent insights from animal studies, critical plant studies and the new materialisms, Danielle Sands reads fiction and philosophy alongside each other to propose a method of thinking of and with animals that draws on a bestiary of affects. She challenges the claim that empathy should be primary mode of engagement with nonhuman life. Instead, she looks at the stories that we tell, and are told, by insects – beings at the edges of animal life. The indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke in us forms the basis for a new ethics not limited by empathy.