examines the variety of nonhuman actors that take center stage in the twenty-first-century novel and the formal changes that the Anthropocene, the digital turn, the animal rights movement and research into plant consciousness have brought to the novel as a formThe collection investigates how the environmental changes and the increasing use of AI technologies have fostered the flourishing of genres like the New Weird, Climate Fiction, and speculative fiction, how it makes us embrace new perceptions of life in relation to genetic engineering, and how it forces us to engage with newly emerging political contexts. The texts, themes, and theoretical paradigms interrogated in the volume document the range and complexity of nonhuman actors in the twenty-first-century novel by focusing on a different kind of nonhuman actor, ranging from animals, trees, and the sea to corpses, clones, and language itself. In discussing thematic and formal features of novels by contemporary writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Ben Marcus, Richard Powers, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yvonne Owuor, Yann Martel, and Ian McEwan, among others, the volume also encourages a transnational and transcultural take on the developments of the novel.weiterlesen