Main description:

Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity examines literary depictions of slaughterhouses from the development of the industrial abattoir in the late nineteenth century to today. The book focuses on how increasing and ongoing isolation and concealment of slaughter from the surrounding society affects readings and depictions of slaughter and abattoirs in literature, and on the degree to which depictions of animals being slaughtered creates an avenue for empathic reactions in the reader or the opportunity for reflections on human-animal relations. Through chapters on abattoir fictions in relation to narrative empathy, anthropomorphism, urban spaces, rural spaces, human identities and horror fiction, Sune Borkfelt contributes to debates in literary animal studies, human-animal studies and beyond.

Contents:

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Fleshing Out Invisibilities

Visibility and Slaughterhouse Histories

Decoding Slaughterhouses

Heterotopias and the Invisibility of Violence and Death

Literature and the Invisible Slaughterhouse

Scope and Outline of Reading Slaughter

2 Literary Narratives and the Empathics of Slaughter

Delimitations and Definitions

Literary Empathy and Animals: Exclusions and Misconceptions

Empathy and Anonymous Animals

Empathy and Nonhuman Individualities

Emotion, Context, and Distance to Slaughter

Empathy, Vulnerability, Sentimentalism, and Care

3 Anthropomorphism and the Abattoir

Slaughter and the Anthropomorphic Animal

Narrating Bovine Mythology in James Agee's 'A Mother's Tale'

Absurdity and Anthropomorphism: Astley's The End of My Tether

Slaughter, Anthropomorphism, Empathy

4 Flesh of the City: Slaughterhouses and the Urban

Concealment and Deindividualization: Egolf's Lord of the Barnyard

Slaughter and the Working Beast

The Proud Slaughterer's Sense of Place: Hind's The Dear Green Place

Humans and Animals: Parallel Disappearances in the Urban

5 Ruralities and the Abattoir

Nostalgia, Rurality, and 'A Question of Place'

Bovines and Rural/Urban Contrasts: Sterchi's The Cow

Rurality, Care Ethics, and Empathy

6 Who Slaughters and Who Consumes? On Butcher(ing) Identities

Shades of Whiteness, Absence of Blackness

Violence in the Workplace: Deviance and Marginalization

(En)Gendered Slaughter

Slaughter, Identities, Animals

7 Dark Spaces: The Horrific Slaughterhouse

Vulnerable Animal Horrors

Being Meat: Others Eating Humans

Cannibalism and the Abattoir

8 Coda