Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction
	Imagination, Science and Power
	Questions of Scale
	Aesthetic Trends
	Chapter Presentation
	Works Cited
I. Invisible Scales: Cells, Microbes and Mycelium
	2. Human Environmental Aesthetics: The Molecular Sublime and the Molecular Grotesque
		The Molecular Sublime
		Imagining Microbes: From the Molecular Sublime to the Molecular Grotesque
		Molecular Landscapes: New Ways of Reading the Anthropocene
		Conclusion: The Big Moment of the Very Small
		Works Cited
	3. Still Life and Vital Matter in Gillian Clarke’s Poetry
		The Poetry of Stone
		Playing with Scale
		Images of Metamorphosis and Development
		Sounding the Flesh
		Science in the Landscape
		Works Cited
	4. Mycoaesthetics: Weird Fungi and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation
		Weird Ecology, Weird Fiction
		Wood Wide Web as Ecological Genome
		The Fungal Kingdom
		Works Cited
II. Neuro-Medical Imaging and Diagnosis
	5. To Be or Not to Be a Patient: Challenging Biomedical Categories in Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed
		Challenging Medical Knowledge and Classifications
		Challenging Neurological Reduction
		Challenging Social and Literary Categories
		Works Cited
	6. Neurocomics and Neuroimaging: David B.’s Epileptic and Matteo Farinella and Hana Roš’s Neurocomic
		The Tools of Comics
		The Tools of Neuroimaging
		A Person Surrounds This Brain
		Works Cited
III. Pandemic Imaginaries
	7. The Fiction of the Empty Pandemic City: Race and Diaspora in Ling Ma’s Severance
		Works Cited
	8. Dead Gods and Geontopower: An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth
		Works Cited
	9. Depopulating the Novel: Post-Catastrophe Fiction, Scale, and the Population Unconscious
		The Population Unconscious
		Cosy Catastrophe
		Population between Science and Speculation in Science Fiction
		Survival at Scale in Post-Catastrophe Science Fiction
		Utopian and Realist Fictions
		Conclusion: Downscaling Survival
		Works Cited
IV. Ecological Scales
	10. The Everyday Pluriverse: Ecosystem Modelling in Reservoir 13
		Introduction: The Rural Mesocosm
		Noticing Nonhuman Narratives
		Visualising Coexistence, Part I
		Modelling Interspecies Assemblages
		Visualising Coexistence, Part II
		Conclusion: Scale and Stoicism in the Everyday Anthropocene
		Works Cited
	11. The Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of Climate Change Comics
		Making the Global Threat Personal
		Anthropomorphic Figures
		Biography and Autobiography
		Scientific Distance Versus Intimate Experience
		Works Cited
	12. Displacing the Human: Representing Ecological Crisis on Stage
		‘It’s Actually Not About Us’: The Paradox of Human-Centric Ecological Drama
		Shifting the Boundaries: The Spatial, the Temporal, and the Sensory
		‘Fragments, Shards, Whispers’: Imagining the Impossible Other
		Conclusion
		Works Cited
	13. Staging Larger Scales and Deep Entanglements: The Choice of Immersion in Four Ecological Performances
		Intermingling Life Forms and Scales
		Forms of Displacement by Immersion
		Reading Signs
		The Place of the Spectator
		A Diplomatic Theatre
		Works Cited
List of Illustrations
Index