Literary naturalism—especially in the American tradition—is a useful mode to explore the significance of the nonhuman, since it can be utilized to focus on the various nonhuman creatures, objects, and natural and created environments that affect human beings. Brandt and Danielsson consider naturalism very broadly, in some instances focusing on authors readers might not immediately connect to literary naturalism. Authors addressed in the volume include Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and others. The collection includes 15 essays (plus a helpful introduction cowritten by the editors) authored by an international collection of scholars of American literature who are informed by ecocriticism, animal studies, posthumanism, and cultural materialism. Essays typically rely on sophisticated theoretical positions, but the collection remains accessible and is overall an insightful and provocative exploration of the significance of the nonhuman in American literary naturalism. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews
In this volume, scholars from Italy, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and the U.S.A. investigate works of American literary naturalism through the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment. By analyzing the Nonhuman elements surrounding human subjects in classic and contemporary naturalist writers, the contributors create fresh insights into the links between theory and criticism and the global ecological crisis.
— Susan Nuernberg, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh
The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism is an illuminating and provocative collection that will stimulate readers to expand their humancentric perspectives to understand the role of the nonhuman—animals, but also entities, processes, and agricultural and urban spaces—in literary naturalism and also its heir, science fiction.
— Keith Newlin, Editor, The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism and The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism
This book makes a substantial contribution to ecocritical and animal studies scholarship. Engaging with (post)humanism, literary aesthetics, and cultural theory, the collection offers fascinating analyses of relationships between humans and Nature—wild and cultivated, constructed, imagined, represented, and speculative. These fresh, original readings demonstrate, more than ever, the continued relevance of American literary naturalism as a field for expanding conversations about humans’ interaction with the environment, human agency, ethics, and aesthetics.
— Anita Duneer, author of Jack London and the Sea