Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression

Description

Bringing together conversations in animal studies, plant studies, ecotheory, and biopolitics, Julian Yates crafts scripts for literary and historical study that embrace the fact that we come into being through our relations to other animal, plant, fungal, microbial, viral, mineral, and chemical actors. What emerges is a methodology that fundamentally alters what it means to read in the twenty-first century.

Julian Yates is professor of English and material culture studies at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minnesota, 2003).

"Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast promises-and delivers-everything. A microcosmos, it treats sheep, plants, microbes, and Benjamin Franklin's bread rolls, ranging from pastoral poetry to Philip K. Dick. At every turn, Yates surprised and delighted me. This volume's multimodal capaciousness, equally adept in historiographical, philosophical, biographical, and even genetic frameworks, should entice anyone feeling the slightest temptation towards posthuman and ecological cultural studies."-Karl Steel, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY "Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression is another of the year's tours de force, an exhilarating rumination on the strange intimacies between nonhuman and human life forms and practices that open a way to imagine the 'multi species' shapes of what we think we know about early modern culture."-Studies in English Literature "Of Sheep is one of the most sophisticated conjunctions of ecocriticism, posthumanism, and historicism to appear in many years, providing a comprehensive index of our current theoretical moment's most influential proper names and terms of art. It's beautiful in the way that all hand-drawn maps are, and it should be widely read."-Studies in English Literature