Lauren Perry-Rummel, alumna of the ALS Ph.D. program, published her first monograph with Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books titled, Animal Texts: Critical Animal Concepts for American Environmental Literature. It has received positive reviews from scholars like Dan Flores, New York Times Bestselling Author of Coyote America. The following is the book description from the publisher’s website:
Animal Texts examines critical works of American Environmental Literature for how they portray, discuss, and represent animals. By interweaving animal studies, literary animal studies, animal science, and close readings, the author establishes critical animal concepts for environmental literature that expand the understanding and knowledge of animal lives to promote conservation and meaningful reflection on current human-animal relationships. Lauren E. Perry-Rummel demonstrates the grave importance and promise these writers saw in the animals alongside them by examining the textual proof of how America’s great environmental writers viewed animals. The author’s tracing of animal texts begins with late nineteenth century American texts from Sarah Orne Jewett, Jack London, into the mid-early twentieth century, ecologically focused works of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, into the later twentieth century with the musings of Edward Abbey and the devastating memoir of Terry Tempest Williams, and ending with the contemporary species-centric works of Nate Blakeslee and Dan Flores.
One review from Dan Flores, New York Times bestselling author of Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, reads:
Scholars of Animal Studies – and truthfully, any readers intrigued by the literary treatment of wildlife in modern America – will find Lauren Perry-Rummels Animal Texts a thoroughly compelling, fascinating book. How are modern writers engaging with wolf recovery, or the spread of coyotes from Pacific to Atlantic shores? Animal Texts smartly interrogates these and many more animal encounters in this distinctive American literary tradition that arguably began with William Bartram and Herman Melville.
Animal Texts is available for order through Rowman and Littlefield, as part of their Ecocriticism and Theory collection.
