How Literature Comes To Matter

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.