Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines some of the most well-known animal-themed Anglophone novels published between the mid-1980s and 2015 alongside influential twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists of the creaturely and theories of biopolitics. It considers aquatic-themed novels that appear to annul the dividing lines between human and animal—what Giorgio Agamben calls the "caesura"—as they meditate on questions of sacrifice. The book focuses on Sara Gruen's enormously popular Water for Elephants as the successor to Life of Pi but also, more importantly, to Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. It also focuses on a pair of millennial texts that imagine catastrophic settings as spaces of human-animal mergers: Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone. The book explores a cluster of fictions of the farm, with special attention to those where not animals but humans are harvested.