On Fiction and Being a Good Animal - Softcover

David P. Rando

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1399538063 ISBN 13: 9781399538060

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Argues that literature has a special role to play in developing a wishful, visionary, and utopian sensibility for living in a more-than-human world

• Suggests ways that fiction can provoke and amaze, inspire and frighten, delight and surprise readers into becoming better animals among nonhuman creatures and within the wider, nonhuman world
• Forges new connections between critical animal studies, critical social theory, and literary ethics
• Encourages readers to attend to the eccentricity of fiction by which we may discover the unseen presences of better worlds for human-nonhuman animal relationships

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.

About this title

About the Author

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1399538063
• ISBN 13: 9781399538060
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136