The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism

Defines posthumanism and provides a summary account of the key literary and cultural theorists in the field.

Joseph Tabbi (Author)

9781009256506, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 November 2024

236 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 1.9 cm, 0.49 kg

'Tabbi's work is both a primer in literary posthumanism and a snapshot of where it is at this moment.… Recommended.' G. D. MacDonald, CHOICE

At a time when scholars in both literary and scientific disciplines are advancing the term posthumanism, this book offers a through-line. Beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and continuing into the post-print, born-digital excursions of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, this literary introduction defines posthumanism and provides a summary account of the key literary and cultural theorists in the field. It embraces humanist refusals from Melville's Bartelby to Thomas Pynchon's authorial surrogation, and more recent evasions and avoidances in the writing of William Gibson, Tom McCarthy, Coleson Whitehead, Jeanette Winterson, and Claire-Louise Bennett. This book also provides close readings of key posthuman fiction, poetry, and conceptual approaches that help ground the discipline.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: not just another period
1. Beyond the Two Cultures?
2. Mary Shelley's modern and Shelley Jackson's postmodern Prometheus
3. Post-periodization
4. Posthuman sublime
5. Ah Bartleby, ah humanities! from transcendentalism to posthumanism
6. The posthuman imagination in contemporary literature
7. Posthuman epic in the era of AI
8. Interlude: N. Katherine Hayles and the cognitive turn in literary posthumanism
9. Digital posthumanism (on the periphery)
Epilogue: platform post(?) pandemic
A collaborative glossary of terms (in process)
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]