This book offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric literary and cultural texts. The contributors take positions that put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by considering the animal presence in texts seriously. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied interdisciplinary, theoretically informed perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts that cutacross geographical and period boundaries and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "animal turn” for the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers some fresh perspectives of Posthumanist theory, so that we can revisit those criteria that created species’ difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book constitutes a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed and explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topicsweiterlesen