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This project explores human-nonhuman relationships in Anglophone literature from the 19th century to the present. It examines how nonhuman actors function within narrative structures, moving beyond their treatment as mere background or metaphor to consider them as integral to storytelling. By engaging with literary depictions of nonhuman entities—plants, animals, objects, and technologies—the project investigates how literature shapes and reflects evolving notions of experience, agency, and materiality.
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A central methodological intervention of this study is the turn toward the mundane, which the project develops as a means to shifting attention from dominant environmental and aesthetic frameworks—such as those centered on gardens, oceans, or artificial intelligence and their associations with beauty or the sublime—to everyday material interactions that often go unnoticed. In defining mundane materiality as a key conceptual framework, the project rethinks embodiment, affect, and ecological aesthetics without relying on notions of exceptionalism or vitalism. By foregrounding the overlooked textures of nonhuman presence, it emphasizes forms of relationality shaped by humility, aliveness, and other ecological affects. In doing so, the project contributes to discussions in New Materialism, Critical Posthumanism, and the Environmental Humanities by offering a perspective that emphasizes ordinary, multisensory engagements with the nonhuman world. As such, it also develops a reading practice that accounts for the subtler ways in which nonhuman agency operates in literary texts.
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Through an interdisciplinary approach that integrates literary studies, philosophy, and environmental thought, the project examines how sensory and emotional dimensions inform our engagement with nonhuman narratives across historical contexts. By tracing the ways literature fosters an attunement to nonhuman presences through affect and materiality, this study argues that literary texts offer alternative epistemologies for understanding interspecies and ecological relations—ones that do not privilege the spectacular, but instead dwell in the ordinary, the entangled, and the everyday.