Anthropoforming: Reframing Human and Nonhuman Relations in Recent Speculative Fiction (Ecocritical Theory and Practice)

This open access book examines the relations between human and nonhuman subjects in recent literary works through three distinct parts of what the author have called anthropoforming. The first focuses on the relationship between human groups and the geological planet, looking in particular at how the nonconscious planetary has reflexive responses to unrestrained processes of consumption and waste expulsion. The second part moves into physiological connections between human groups and nonhuman inhabitants of the planet and examines how the nonhuman relationships here reshape the way one understands what the human is and how that human relates to a wider world. As these relationships sometimes force actual evolutions, this part of the project investigates how evolution comes about due to a changing relationship first with the planet, then the plant kingdom, and finally with the technological.