Livestock and Literature

"This innovative, richly synthetic, and field-extending study explores literary narratives—in particular, works of science fiction and speculative fiction—that envision farmed animals as agential participants in multispecies futures. Drawing on research in literary animal studies, narrative theory, anthropology, philosophy, and other domains, the author maps out textual engagements with postanimality, whereby nonhuman animals caught up in the exploitative dynamics of industrialized meat production become inextricably interlinked with humans as well as (bio)technologies. Through detailed, state-of-the-art analyses of storytelling practices by a range of writers—from Margaret Atwood and Laura Jean McKay to Deb Olin Unferth and Adam Roberts—Literature and Livestock compellingly reframes narrative as a space of possibility in which disvalued and elided animal lives can be imagined otherwise." —David Herman, author of Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life 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. Liza B. Bauer is 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.