This chapter argues that anthropological studies of human relationships with animals can draw our attention towards – rather than away from – the importance of representation within human ethical lives. The chapter posits that the anthropological ethical turn and the animal turn are each orientated in different ways to the concept of ‘representation’. This means the two traditions speak at cross-purposes to one another, visible particularly in their distinctive innovations in relation to ‘personhood’. From the perspective of the ethical turn, the personhood (or agency) attributed to animals by multispecies ethnographers appears ethically thin. From the perspective of the animal turn, the ethicists’ focus on varied human-held forms of reflection risks repeating dualistic distinctions and portraying animals only as they appear within human accounts. Yet the chapter shows that these two emerging traditions can benefit from one another, in attending to ‘more-than-representational’ (not non-representational) aspects of ethics. These include (1) the material/embodied form of ethical representations, (2) the fact that ethical life often seems inherently hard to represent, and (3) varied ethical attitudes towards representation (such as the ‘honesty’ sometimes associated with lack of speech) that can be seen as and when people interact with their animals.

The non-human has a long history of being represented in literature. Plants, animals, spirits, gods and, more recently, machines have been given agency and helped create enchanted visions of the world. The non-human has also been important in presenting universally recognizable characters, which have been central to the influence of certain genres and works in world literature, e.g. fairy tales and magical realism. This influence continues to be important but it has been supplemented with a new focus on the posthuman. Even though the idea of a succession to humanity would have been a logical consequence of Darwinism, it is has become a more pressing issue with the development of new technologies. Instead of apocalyptic visions of the end of the world, which have been central to not least foundational religious systems, the idea of the posthuman conjures up a new era for better or worse. Science fiction is rife with posthuman figures but also mainstream authors are taking up ideas of radically changed conditions for living. Literature’s responses have been manifold and have explored the once dated question of universalism under the influence of very concrete scenarios of change, and with a renewed sense of highlighting essential human traits in the Anthropocene.

What does it mean to build digital worlds in the Anthropocene? Despite their compromised provenance, computer and video games offer a potent avenue for designing and partaking in environmental scenarios. As a review of the varied approaches to ludic world design suggests, differences in opinion as to who or what constitutes a viable game world – broadly speaking, designers, players, software or spaces – bear on environmental impasses in our shared world, which is marked by multispecies entanglements and obligations. If the essence of world-building lies primarily not in a singular, authorial intent or vision but in a collective imagining and realisation, then designed worlds may serve as both inspirations and cautionary tales for our ecologically compromised times.

Our standard accounts associate modernism with the new, the now, the punctual. This chapter reckons with a countervailing type of modernist temporality: moments when the contemporary is perforated, displaced, or haunted by deep time. Such moments can look back on the present from a time to come, or they can peer back from the present into pre-modern or pre-historic times. After tracing an array of literary modernist engagements with deep time, particularly in Virginia Woolf’s novels, the chapter turns to the work of O. G. S. Crawford, the British archaeologist and former RAF observer who used aerial photographic techniques honed during World War I to discover and study Neolithic sites during the 1920s and 1930s. In Crawford’s crossing of cutting-edge flying and seeing technologies with long human and pre-human timelines, we encounter an invitation that Woolf and other modernists accepted: to close the gap between punctual and longitudinal time.