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1. Introduction: Multispecies Fictions and Their Acoustic Contact Zones -- 2. Biodiversity’s Bandwidth -- 3. Polyphony Beyond the Human -- 4. Multispecies Multilingualism -- 5. Reading the Animal Pulse -- 6. Whale Song in Submarine Fiction -- 7. Conclusion: Sonic Curiosity at the End of the World. “This book is an ambitious and original piece of literary criticism that recounts the presence of multispecies soundscapes in twenty-first-century fiction and their functions as human responses to/engagement with nonhuman sound. De Bruyn pulls the frameworks of contemporary literature, animal studies and sound studies together to tell us that there are many ways to listen to the natural world, and that contemporary literature should not be underestimated for the opportunities it offers to do so.” — Lucile Desblache, Professor of Translation and Transcultural Studies, University of Roehampton, UK The contemporary novel is not as silent as we tend to believe, nor does it only attend to human plots and characters. As this book shows, writers in a range of subgenres have devoted considerable attention to the voices of nonhuman animals, and to the histories and technologies of listening that shape twenty- first-century cultures and environments. In doing so, their multispecies novels illuminate the cultural meanings we attach to creatures like dogs, frogs, whales, chimpanzees, and Tasmanian tigers – not to mention various bird species and even plants. At the same time, these stories explore the attitudes of distinct communities of human listeners, ranging from vets and musicians to chimp caretakers and sonar technicians. In highlighting animal sounds and their cultural meanings, these novels by authors including Amitav Ghosh, Julia Leigh, Richard Powers, Karen Joy Fowler, Cormac McCarthy, and Han Kang also enrich pressing debates about species extinction, sound pollution, nonhuman communication, and human-animal relations. As we are violently reshaping the planet, they invite us to reimagine our own humanity and animality – and to rethink how we tell stories about multispecies contact zones and their complex soundscapes. Ben De Bruyn teaches English Literature at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He is the co-editor of Literature Now (2016) and the author of several articles on contemporary fi ction and the environmental humanities in journals like Studies in the Novel and Textual Practice.
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