Narratology beyond the Human

Abstract

This book aims to develop a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships. In outlining this integrative approach to storytelling in a more-than-human setting, the study also considers the enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media, examining a range of fictional and nonfictional texts disseminated in print, comics and graphic novels, and film. Focusing on techniques employed in these media, including the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives on events, shifts backward and forward in narrative time, the embedding of stories within stories, and others, the book explores how specific strategies for portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes toward animal life. Conversely, emphasizing that stories are, in general, interwoven with cultures’ ontologies, their assumptions about what sorts of beings populate the world and how those beings’ qualities and abilities relate to the qualities and abilities ascribed to humans, promises to reshape existing frameworks for narrative inquiry. Ideas that have been foundational for the field are at stake here, including ideas about what makes narratives more or less amenable to being interpreted as narratives, about the extent to which differences of genre affect attributions of mental states to characters (human as well as nonhuman) in narrative contexts, and about the suitability of stories as a means for engaging with supraindividual phenomena unfolding over long timescales and in widely separated places, including patterns and events situated at the level of animal populations and species rather than particular creatures.