The Animal Unbound: Liminal Bodies, Language, and the Contemporary Southern Novel

Abstract

There is much scholarship on marginalised bodies in southern literature, yet among the research lies an identifiable gap in the discussion of contemporary novels that examine the American South as a region replete with human and nonhuman animal presences. Furthermore, there continue to be remarkable human-animal connections present in recent fiction concerned with the region. However, there remains a lack of scholarly attention directed toward the animals in these narratives in ways that attempt to understand their plight through animal studies while placing them at the centre of a cross-species investigation. Considering these issues, I propose the following question: How does reading and thinking of, and with, literary nonhuman animals, especially when informed by the conditions of the American South, offer effective ways of understanding ordinary bodies across species? To address this question, this thesis turns to the human and nonhuman animal bodies in novels by Karen Russell, C. E. Morgan, Jesmyn Ward, and Katya Apekina, narratives that navigate the historically complex conditions of the South by recognising human and nonhuman animals that exist alongside one another. This awareness of, and encounters with, animals draw attention to the precarious condition of bodies across the species divide. An understanding of the shared grounds occupied by human and nonhuman animals requires turning to ordinary earthbound bodies in liminal situations, their unstable existences made especially visible in fictionalisations of a region rooted in violence histories. Thus, this thesis explores three types of liminal bodies—(post-)incarcerated, immature, and ill—that are not only vulnerable but frequently misunderstood. These bodies are involved in meaningful interspecies encounters that invite a rethinking of both human language and corporeal communication—behaviours, sounds, and silences—that affect how and why humans write about nonhuman animals.