Introduction

Drawing inspiration from the unconventional typography of Mark Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves, this introduction lays out the main conceptual coordinates for the collection: spatiality, literary form, and the way in which the climate crisis prompts a reconfiguration of human–nonhuman relations. We argue, in dialogue with narrative theory, New Formalism, and debates on the Anthropocene, that the literary experience of space can serve as a springboard for the imagination of the nonhuman. Through unsettling and challenging spaces, literary narrative can disrupt anthropocentric and binary ways of thinking, as the essays collected in the book demonstrate through a variety of close readings of contemporary fiction and modernist works, as well as nineteenth-century travel writing.