Entangled Life in Twenty-First-Century Fiction : A Multi-scalar Poetics

Will appeal to all readers interested in the ecological power of literature. Views fiction as a sensing instrument which helps us to engage with other scales of life. It shows how contemporary novels and short stories are shaping our biological awareness and ecological responsibility. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Liliane Campos argues that contemporary fiction is shaping a new, multi-scalar view of life. In the early twenty-first century, humans face complex relations of dependency with the invisibly small and the ungraspably huge, from the viral to the planetary. Entangled Life examines how Anglophone fiction imagines this ecological interdependence. It outlines an emergent poetics across a range of genres, including realist fiction, science-fiction, weird fiction and dystopian fiction. Arguing that literary form performs epistemic and ethical work, Campos analyses the rhetorical strategies through which these stories connect human and nonhuman scales. She shows that fiction uses three recurrent devices – critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis and scalar irony – to shape our awareness of other scales and forms of life, and our response-ability towards them. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.