Since the early nineteenth century, critics have noted John Clare’s unusually attentive eye for animals. From his earliest published pieces to the final poems transcribed from manuscripts in Northampton Asylum, Clare’s poetry is packed with animal life. This piece closely reads two sonnets from the middle of his career to investigate the breadth and complexity of his engagement with multiple non-human modes of being. It then turns to a representative range of other examples from his work and touches briefly upon critical analogies drawn between the poet and the non-human creatures about which he writes. The piece focuses repeatedly on the variety in Clare’s representations of animals and the consequent difficulty of drawing singular critical conclusions from them. In the process, it explores tensions in Clare’s poetry between themes of interconnection and alienation, freedom and confinement, profusion and scarcity, resilience and fragility, and exposure and agency.

In this chapter, a clear outline is presented for analyzing confusing or contentious rights issues in business dealings. The case of perilous shipbreaking practices is used to invite intuitions about the minimal rights and entitlements that are owed to workers. Positive rights, where actions must be taken, are distinguished from negative ones, where a firm may not interfere with preexisting rights. Human rights are further contrasted to privileges, which come about through a legal framework. Critically, privileges are liable to revocation at any time by legislation, whereas human rights exist outside the legal sphere. Actions by oil firms in the Niger Delta are discussed as examples of different attitudes to the rights of indigenous peoples. Whether sweatshops conditions are ever voluntary or acceptable is also examined. It is noted that some religious views emphasize the common good rather than individual welfare, and rights claims often reflect a Western perspective where personal choice is paramount. Subsequently, the question is asked whether nonhumans or the environment might be rights-holders. The concluding case assesses the notion of privacy and whether it is a human right or simply a legal construct in the internet age.

This chapter focuses on James Joyce’s investments in life at the microscopic level in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a way of linking literature and science methodology with Grusin’s (2015) concept of a “nonhuman turn.” Ebury’s intervention is to turn an established critical conversation about Joyce’s knowledge of the nature of matter towards his aesthetic and ethical emphasis on nonhuman life, and consider how his interests in science facilitate an awareness of connectedness across different categories of being. Previous ecocritical scholarship on Joyce has mostly concerned itself with whole entities, from Joyce’s representation of rivers or trees to Joyce’s attitudes to specific species and biological principles. Ebury builds on Tim Clark’s (2015) “scale framing” approach to argue that Joyce’s use of the nonhuman microscopic scale, informed by the complexities of quantum physics, might help us to cope with the difficult equation of our responsibility to the nonhuman.

This chapter maps out the central paradigms for conceptualizing the monsters of American horror, marking their inextricability from politics and moving toward identifying the principal forms of monstrosity in the early twenty-first century. Monstrosity has been defined as impure and abject, existing on borders, not categorizable; the incarnation of “otherness,” typically racial, gendered, sexual, or class; and a terrifying reflection of the “self,” as the monster has increasingly become an avatar of “normality” rather than what threatens it, embodying dominant rather than marginalized social structures and ideologies. Most recently, monsters are being generated by scientific explorations that insist on the thoroughgoing entanglement of life, the ways in which the “human” is not singular, not exceptional, but rather symbiotically entwined with nonhuman life. This form of horror is adeptly exploited in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, about an entangled fungus and a colonial family.

Mark Goble uses the concept of convergence to explore the implications of formal and temporal compression, economy, and slowness in an age of unprecedented expansion and speedup. Richard McGuire’s Here presents an extreme example of spatial restriction and temporal expansion, while novels by Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, and William Gibson juxtapose ecological, scientific, technological, and theological timespans to human ones in ways that echo postmodern and science fiction precursors, but with very different aims and warnings in mind for denizens of the Anthropocene.

Heather Houser considers the conceptual frameworks of a topic that bears on nearly every other chapter in this Companion, contemporary “cli-fi” and ecocritical approaches to current literature. When writers presume transformational climate change as a starting point, rather than an abstract possibility, they narrate an “uncanny valley of familiarity and radical alteration” that extends, accelerates, or alters the logics of the present into near or distant futures of drought, warfare, destitution, and superstorms.

This chapter provides an overview of the volume’s purposes and describes why various chapters and critical perspectives have been included in it. It connects the wider project of various ways of thinking “after the human” to the inadequacy of western liberal theoretical perspectives in the face of contemporary challenges: climate change, growing economic inequality, ongoing injustices originating in colonialism and racialization, and espeiallly new developments in science and in STS scholarship that undermines distinctions once made between humans and other organisms, and between organisms and manufactured systems. It explains that the “post” of posthumanism has a range of meanings to different research communities, and argues that it is important that the volume collects perspectives that do not all align with one another, given that dissatifcation with “the human” can be traced, by multiple pathways and to multiple conculsions, to its false claims for universality. Posthumanism, thus, does not label a single new way of thinking about agency and being, but describes a process by which negotiate multiplicity within politics of affinity.

New materialism is a contested term, as its theoretical approaches diverge from each other while overlapping with many other theories in the nonhuman turn. This essay introduces new materialist theories and their relation to posthumanism by outlining their distinguishing characteristics, such as the conceptions of material agency.  It centers new materialism in feminist science studies, especially the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.  The essay also takes up the question of whether or how new materialism is political, by analyzing the intersections between new materialisms and a range of other theories, topics, and orientations, including environmentalism, race, indigeneity, postcolonialist science studies, and disability studies.

This chapter examines the implications of theories of affect and embodiment for posthumanism. It argues that the recognition of bodies as fluid, co-composed, material and relational constitutes a crucial site for the emergence of the posthumanities.  After examining the impact of Spinoza on Western ontologies of the body via Gilles Deleuze, the chapter addresses the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences and its consequences for how we understand affect, embodiment and the human. From affect as autonomous intensity to the cultural politics of affect to queer theories of embodiment in, this chapter shows how theories of affect and embodiment leads to the limits of the human and humanist knowledge production. This question of bodies, however, also exposes problems in the desire to move ‘beyond the human,’ when many racialized bodies were never fully counted as human. Scholars discussed include Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, Anna Gibbs, Erin Manning, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Dana Luciano, Mel Chen, Eliza Steinbock, Zakkiyah Jackson and Jasbir Puar.