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Although one might expect that a high aggregate number of named animal species in an author's works would code for an animal-centric theme, Franz Kafka's case proves that such a statistical inference is problematic, if not outright flawed. This essay offers an exception (or perhaps correction) to the main assumption of stylometrics, which maintains that style and content can be assessed by frequency counts. Kafka's writings on animals defy straightforward assumptions about how language conveys meaning.

This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.

Children’s picture books, both fiction and non-fiction, play a vital role in introducing the reader to the natural world. Here we examine the representation of turtles, terrapins and tortoises (Testudines) in 204 English language picture books and find a mean of 3.9 (SD 9.1) basic biological errors per book. Only 83 (40.7%) of the examined books were found to be error-free in the representation of Testudines, with no significant improvement in biological accuracy being observed over time (book publication date range 1974–2017). Suggestions are made as to how biological accuracy of children’s literature could be improved to help foster children’s understanding and wonder of the natural world. Fantasy and imagination have an important role within children’s literature, but here it is argued that the books children read should support future generations having sufficient understanding of the natural world to imagine the solutions to current environmental problems. A role of children’s picture books should not be to reinforce biological illiteracy.

Books and essays about animals in Melville's works have overwhelmingly discussed whales and their presence in Moby-Dick. This note aims to provide a more comprehensive view of Melville's literary fauna and lists its more than 350 animal species. The list is evidence of Melville's expansive interest in non-human animals and a testament to his tendency to meticulously label and categorize phenomena. The list derives from a manual calculation across all of Melville's extant prose fiction, using the Northwestern-Newberry editions as primary source-texts.

Graham-Bertolini discusses Karen Russell's Swamplandia! Swamplandia! (2011) obscures the boundary between life and death, resulting in a modern gothic/grotesque narrative that transposes the action of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic from crumbling mansion to the contemporary locale of the Florida Everglades. It is the story of the Bigtrees, a family that for two and a half generations has owned and operated an alligator theme park called Swamplandia! on an island located thirty miles off of the Florida coast. The park is threatened by foreclosure, which would force the family to relocate to the mainland. What's worse, the Bigtrees have accumulated massive debt because of a new technological marvel on the mainland, The World of Darkness theme park, which has siphoned away their customers. Swamplandia!'s demise is hastened by the sudden death-by-cancer of their star performer, Hilola Bigtree, alligator-wrestler extraordinaire and mother of the three adolescent children who live and work on the island. The novel thus opens with a mood as uncertain as the swampland itself, which is neither terra firma nor subaqueous, but a condition somewhere in between--the terra viscous.

In both literature and philosophy, geologic matter has been imagined as a vector of extending perception and analysis into the territory of not only the nonhuman, but also the non-living, challenging the very distinctions between life and non-life, agile and inert matter. Recently, the debates over the concept of the Anthropocene amplified our fascination with the geologic, bringing into view the inescapable bond of human and Earth’s history. The article probes the possibilities of the geologic turn through two short stories published in the era of the Anthropocene debates—Margaret Atwood’s ‘Stone Mattress’ (2013) and A.S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003). The stories’ interest in a geologic setting, their staging of human-mineral intimacies, and their geologically-infused aesthetics position these two stories as fictions of the geologic turn. I examine how these writers—through reconfiguring the relations between bios and geos, human and nonhuman—forge alternatives to an extractive relation to the geos, as well as refuse to accept the figure of Earth as either an inert object or a victim. In this reframing, they also exemplify feminist critique of the imagined unity of ‘Anthropos’ that is named by the Anthropocene thinkers.