On Fiction and Being a Good Animal
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€25.99
A01=David P. Rando
anthropocosmic
Author_David P. Rando
better worlds
Category=DSBH
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSK
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
good animal
human-nonhuman animal relationships
non-anthropocentrism
value of fiction
wishful images
Product details
- ISBN 9781399538060
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Instead of making readers into better people, what if fiction could help us to become better animals? On Fiction and Being a Good Animal argues that we should abandon the persistent humanist idea that fiction can produce better people. Instead, we should read and value fiction according to its ability to help us to envision being better animals. Inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, David Rando defines a good animal as one who does not live a life of domination. He argues that when readers approach fiction’s wishful images with non-anthropocentric expectations, we are rewarded by anthropocosmic visions of the world - ones in which humans are in and with the world but no longer at the centre of it.
In compelling readings of Agustina Bazterrica, T. C. Boyle, Leonora Carrington, Marian Engel, Karen Joy Fowler, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, Kenzaburo Oe, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jesmyn Ward, the book explores wishful images that pertain to the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. Readers will discover in this fiction wishful images relating to irreconcilable minds and experiences, human-nonhuman family relationships, love and risk across race and species, and shared vulnerability, communion and pleasure.
David P. Rando is Professor in the Department of English at Trinity University, Texas, USA. He is the author of six books: Artificial Fiction: Imagining Literary Possibility Beyond the Human (2026), On Fiction and Being a Good Animal (2024), Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human–Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction (2023), Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (2022), Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology (2017) and Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century (2011).
