New Materialist Literary Theory: Critical Conceptions of Literature for the Anthropocene

This edited collection lends its origin to recent strands in philosophy that promote a critical conceptual return to the material world outside human culture. Through the lens of literary analysis and theory, this book devises the potential of New Materialism as a timely mode of critique towards the current human condition and its effect on literature and the present. With chapters by renowned literary scholars and theorists, key New Materalist conceptions of entanglement and speculation are represented by onto-epistemology and speculative respectively. Both of these concepts critically stipulate our precarious relation to this planet's matter following human interference. Entanglement analyzes this inference and its consequences, while speculation makes our cognitive limits in grasping these consequences and our obligation to continue trying to grasp them palpable. Literature acts as the site in which entanglement and speculation, as well as their alignment, are intensively presented and negotiated. Entanglement and speculation (theory) come together to work towards a critical literary theory fit for the Anthropocene.