Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction (Marco Caracciolo, Marlene Marcussen, and David Rodriguez)

Part I: Objects and the Resources of Description

1. Containment and Empathy in Katherine Mansfield’s and Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories (Laura Oulanne)

2. Floating Air—Solid Furniture: Vibrant Spaces in Virginia Woolf’s "Time Passes" (Marlene Karlsson Marcussen)

3. The Descriptive Turn in German Nature-Oriented Neue Sachlichkeit (1913–1933): An Essay on Nonhuman Literary Genres (Michael Karlsson Pedersen)

Part II: Catastrophic Narrative Environments

4. Nonhuman Presence and Ontological Instability in Twenty-First-Century New York Fiction (Lieven Ameel)

5. Seasonal Feelings: Reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl During Winter Depression (Kaisa Kortekallio)

6. Imagining Posthuman Environments in the Anthropocene: The Function of Space in Post-Apocalyptic Climate Change Fiction (Carolin Gebauer)

7. "It Wants to Become Real and Can Only Become Prose": Anthropocenic Focalization in 10:04 and The World Without Us (David Rodriguez)

Part III: Scales and Limits of Narrative

8. Maarit Verronen’s Monomaniacs of the Anthropocene: Scaling the Nonhuman in Contemporary Finnish Fiction (Sarianna Kankkunen)

9. Plotting the Nonhuman: The Geometry of Desire in Contemporary "Lab Lit" (Marco Caracciolo)

10. Lithic Space-Time in Lyric: Narrating the Poetic Anthropocene (Brian J. McAllister)

11. Narrating the "Great Outdoors" : A Complete and Unabridged Guide: With Travelogue, Bestiary, Judgement

(Ridvan Askin)

12. Inside the Great Outdoors (Line Henriksen)

About the Author

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project "Narrating the Mesh." Marco’s work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of five books, including most recently Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (2021).

Marlene Karlsson Marcussen holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern Denmark, where she currently is a scientific assistant. She is the co-editor of How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction (2021) and has published a number of publications on modernism, materiality, and space such as "The Postapocalyptic Motherhood" (2019) and "The Abundance of Things in the Midst of Writing: A Post-Anthropocentric View on Description and Georges Perec’s ‘Still Life/Style Leaf’" (2021).

David Rodriguez is a postdoctoral researcher. He holds a PhD in English from Stony Brook University. His dissertation, Spaces of Indeterminacy: Aerial Description and Environmental Imagination in 20th Century American Fiction, studies images of the environment in the novels of Willa Cather, Paul Bowles, and Don DeLillo. He has written further about the phenomenology of reading descriptions of the view from above in Frontiers of Narrative Studies and econarratology in English Studies.