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Article published In: Voicing Absences/Presences in a Damaged World
Edited by Jessica Maufort and Marc Maufort
[English Text Construction 15:2] 2022
► pp. 118–137

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Animals squawking their mysteries

Narrative, poetic form, and the nonhuman in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country

ORCiD logo with link | Ghent University
Published online: 1 June 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00053.car
Abstract
Scholarship on literature’s engagement with the climate crisis has frequently highlighted the limitations of the realist novel vis-à-vis the scale and wide-ranging ramifications of climate change. This article reads Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (. 2020. The animals in that country. Brunswick: Scribe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) as a powerful example of how the cross-fertilization of narrative and poetic forms can expand the imaginative reach of the novel. Through the plot device of a pandemic that enables human-nonhuman communication, McKay’s novel explores the fragility of nonhuman life in a world shaped by the violence of advanced capitalist societies. The poetic nature of the animals’ utterances complicates interpretation and draws attention to the complexities of human-nonhuman entanglement, echoing – and performing through literary form – the ethical position formulated by Deborah Bird Rose under the rubric of “ecological existentialism.”
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Body
  • 3.Voice
  • 4.Form
  • 5.Ethics
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (45)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Browne, Josephine
2025. Australian dystopia and the (m)anthropocene: future-thinking men and masculinities in The Animals in That Country (McKay 2020) and Juice (Winton 2024). NORMA 20:4 ► pp. 325 ff. DOI logo

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