Chapter 10 - Habitat

Summary

This chapter identifies habitat as a crucial concept for literary animal studies. Habitat, as a biological concept, is compared with Jakob von Uexküll theory of Umwelt, a given organism’s subjective experience of inhabiting its distinct territory. Both terms are important for animal studies because they enable us to attend to the material and perceptual life worlds of wild creatures, ways of living threatened by habitat loss and climate change. I consider the distinct imaginative work of evoking habitat as a literary setting, discussing four literary works – John Clare’s poetry, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” – that connect human self-awareness with careful attention to the particular ways in which different species of animals dwell in the world.