This chapter considers Shelley’s attempt to think before the “Error and Truth” of Enlightenment humanity, and before the binaristic split between the white male bourgeois Human and those not included in those definitions of humanity. Tracing his iconoclastic resistance to normative categories of gender, race, and the human as well as his idealistic attempt to recreate those categories in a reading of The Witch of Atlas, with its double creation of Witch and the Witch’s “sexless” creature, the chapter explores the poet’s radical understanding of gender and sex beyond the male–female binary alongside the poet’s commentary and critique on the dimorphic gender–sex systems circulating in discourse of his day. The chapter argues that his imagining of the creation of new beings – both the Witch and her creature – figure Shelley’s reply to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as an alternative being beyond Western, Enlightenment notions of the human. Particularly through the envisioning of the nonbinary being of the Witch's creature as well as its flight through the world as an “image” and “sexless thing,” Shelley attempts to conceive of a continuum of gender and sex, one in which the gendered and racialized alterity of the Witch’s creature is embraced and prioritized, even though it may be imperfectly imagined.

Heather Houser considers the conceptual frameworks of a topic that bears on nearly every other chapter in this Companion, contemporary “cli-fi” and ecocritical approaches to current literature. When writers presume transformational climate change as a starting point, rather than an abstract possibility, they narrate an “uncanny valley of familiarity and radical alteration” that extends, accelerates, or alters the logics of the present into near or distant futures of drought, warfare, destitution, and superstorms.

Soon after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, Pompeii seemed to have vanished. The buried city maintained a presence in the region’s collective memory primarily as an overwhelming absence, repressed even in the near-contemporary poetry that ruminated on its demise. In such texts, the name of Pompeii is conspicuous by its absence, and the shock over the swallowing up of this solid ancestral ground is keenly felt. This chapter argues that Martial, Statius, and others initiate the trope of Pompeii as an absent presence that continues to characterize our responses to the site today, even in the face of the apparently abundant materiality of the site. By following Pompeii’s disappearing act from these Latin authors through a variety of more recent engagements with the city – from the subterranean journey to the site in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), to the sci-fi dislocation of the city in Amelie Nothomb’s novella, Péplum (1996), and the recent video installation Soleil Noir (2014), in which Pompeii becomes a post-human landscape – we can observe Pompeii’s importance as a locus for understanding the absences that permeate Roman culture, and our modern receptions of it.

The non-human has a long history of being represented in literature. Plants, animals, spirits, gods and, more recently, machines have been given agency and helped create enchanted visions of the world. The non-human has also been important in presenting universally recognizable characters, which have been central to the influence of certain genres and works in world literature, e.g. fairy tales and magical realism. This influence continues to be important but it has been supplemented with a new focus on the posthuman. Even though the idea of a succession to humanity would have been a logical consequence of Darwinism, it is has become a more pressing issue with the development of new technologies. Instead of apocalyptic visions of the end of the world, which have been central to not least foundational religious systems, the idea of the posthuman conjures up a new era for better or worse. Science fiction is rife with posthuman figures but also mainstream authors are taking up ideas of radically changed conditions for living. Literature’s responses have been manifold and have explored the once dated question of universalism under the influence of very concrete scenarios of change, and with a renewed sense of highlighting essential human traits in the Anthropocene.

North Korea and posthuman superheroes rarely share discursive space. One reason: North Korea - the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) - is often imagined as a pre-posthuman Cold War relic. Another reason: it may seem wrong, even blasphemous, to discuss posthumanism and superheroes vis-à-vis a regime that systematically violates human rights. While mindful of such realities, I believe posthumanism can refresh overly rehearsed scripts surrounding the DPRK. The vocabulary of posthumanism (e.g. Donna Haraway’s “cyborg”) and posthuman characters from science fiction (e.g. the instantly legible superhero Spider-Man as well as the less legible Korean American Spider Lim in Richard Powers’s novel Plowing the Dark) can provide new approaches to North Korea’s “otherness” and “post”-DPRK refugees. Moreover, superheroic icons and posthumanism can address a new American art of DPRK origin such as the artwork of Song Byeok and Sun Mu. Finally, posthumanism and superheroes must narrate Korea’s future beyond trauma, war, and division. It is time for us to uproot, fruitfully, kimilsungia and kimjongilia from their rotting namesakes. Let them grow wild in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). How might these organisms mutate? Dear Korean and Korean American artists and writers: let us now respond.

The conclusion sums up the work, indicating the core elements shared by (Hellenic) theories of daimonification along with (Jewish and Christian) theories of angelification. One common element is the link of virtue (ethical transformation) with physical and cognitive transformation. It is this persistent link that allows ancient theories of posthuman transformation to serve as correctives for current Transhumanist visions of posthuman enhancement. Transhumanists often speak of cognitive and physical improvements with no robust reflection on ethical or moral improvement. Posthuman enhancement must never be defined apart from morality, but in terms of it. Morality cannot simply be programmed from without, nor can it be governed by the overall value of personal autonomy.

What remains in life’s wake? Postapocalyptic literature long has imagined the end as a kind of beginning; someone or something always survives Armageddon, if only for a time. This is the postapocalyptic condition of possibility, enabling the genre’s cathected tropes of loss and redemption, regression and advance. Even when the survivors are not recognizably human—are androids, aliens, or nonhuman animals—“life” goes on. Engaging with a range of American fiction and nonfiction (from Ray Bradbury to Octavia Butler to Ray Kurzweil), this essay argues that what unites the posthuman and the postapocalyptic is, first, a shared, vitalistic investment in what might be called “life after death” and, second, a refusal or inability to narrate a final, lasting extinction. In H. P. Lovecraft’s radical take on Darwinian evolution, however, we can see the prospect of a posthuman sublime that never reconstitutes the autonomous subject. The chapter concludes with a brief meditation on the implications—metaphysical, biopolitical, and critical—of this self-alienation.

This chapter argues that speculative fiction is an important tool for the posthumanism project of deconstructing and critiquing the default “man” of western humanism. The genre’s techniques of defamiliarization and literalizing metphor find parallels in works of posthumanist theory, and I argue that this fiction is a form of everyday theorizing of the same questions that inform posthumanist theory. Like posthumanist theory, science fiction questions what it means to be human, and often attitudes agency and cognition to nonhuman entities. This chapter reviews the genre’s contributions to posthumanism in the areas of transhumanism and smart systems, genetic engineering and synthetic biology, the Internet of Things, and climate change and ecological sustainability. It argues that there is a reciprocal exchange between imaginative visions and material practice, making sf a discourse of world transformation.

This chapter provides an overview of the volume’s purposes and describes why various chapters and critical perspectives have been included in it. It connects the wider project of various ways of thinking “after the human” to the inadequacy of western liberal theoretical perspectives in the face of contemporary challenges: climate change, growing economic inequality, ongoing injustices originating in colonialism and racialization, and espeiallly new developments in science and in STS scholarship that undermines distinctions once made between humans and other organisms, and between organisms and manufactured systems. It explains that the “post” of posthumanism has a range of meanings to different research communities, and argues that it is important that the volume collects perspectives that do not all align with one another, given that dissatifcation with “the human” can be traced, by multiple pathways and to multiple conculsions, to its false claims for universality. Posthumanism, thus, does not label a single new way of thinking about agency and being, but describes a process by which negotiate multiplicity within politics of affinity.

“Race and the Limitations of the Human” analyzes the racial dimensions of a process of humanization linked to imperial conquest. Rather than seeing in the violence committed against diverse peoples during the colonization of the Americas a force of dehumanization, this chapter reads this violence as part and parcel of the liberal western humanist order that continues to be experimentally and pedagogically worked out in colonial and nation-building projects. The chapter tracks this humanizing process through debates about Indigenous and Black humanity in conversation with critiques of posthumanist theory as an extension of the western enlightenment project. The question posed is whether—rather than understanding the “post-“ to refer to either an after to the humanizing project or a return to its initiatory moments as critical gesture—it might be better to view it as a suspension or refusal of the western colonial project and its racialized, humanized order.

New materialism is a contested term, as its theoretical approaches diverge from each other while overlapping with many other theories in the nonhuman turn. This essay introduces new materialist theories and their relation to posthumanism by outlining their distinguishing characteristics, such as the conceptions of material agency.  It centers new materialism in feminist science studies, especially the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.  The essay also takes up the question of whether or how new materialism is political, by analyzing the intersections between new materialisms and a range of other theories, topics, and orientations, including environmentalism, race, indigeneity, postcolonialist science studies, and disability studies.

This chapter examines the implications of theories of affect and embodiment for posthumanism. It argues that the recognition of bodies as fluid, co-composed, material and relational constitutes a crucial site for the emergence of the posthumanities.  After examining the impact of Spinoza on Western ontologies of the body via Gilles Deleuze, the chapter addresses the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences and its consequences for how we understand affect, embodiment and the human. From affect as autonomous intensity to the cultural politics of affect to queer theories of embodiment in, this chapter shows how theories of affect and embodiment leads to the limits of the human and humanist knowledge production. This question of bodies, however, also exposes problems in the desire to move ‘beyond the human,’ when many racialized bodies were never fully counted as human. Scholars discussed include Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, Anna Gibbs, Erin Manning, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Dana Luciano, Mel Chen, Eliza Steinbock, Zakkiyah Jackson and Jasbir Puar.

From the first reviews of The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy’s debut novel – published just three years after William Faulkner’s death and edited by Albert Erskine, who had worked with the Nobel laureate at Random House – comparisons with Faulkner’s work have been irresistible in the discussion of McCarthy’s fiction. This chapter focuses on key moments in McCarthy’s oeuvre that suggestively cite, parody, contest, unwrite, or otherwise engage Faulkner’s writings, to mine these connections for deeper insights into theme, form, and vision in two of the most distinguished bodies of work in American fiction. Most explicit in Suttree, with its overt echoes and revisions of The Sound and the Fury, McCarthy’s running intertextual dialogue with Faulkner also surfaces to notable effect in All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, The Road, and the many places in McCarthy’s work where the county figures as a meaningful imaginative geography, political formation, or social unit – thereby conjuring the specter of Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha, perhaps his supreme imaginative achievement. Other Faulkner works discussed include Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable.