Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

by Sune Borkfelt

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.

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
Works Cited

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
Works Cited

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
Works Cited

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
Works Cited

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
Works Cited

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
Works Cited

7 Dark Spaces: The Horrific Slaughterhouse
Vulnerable Animal Horrors
Being Meat: Others Eating Humans
Cannibalism and the Abattoir
Works Cited

8 Coda
Works Cited
Index

287 pages, Hardcover

Published May 7, 2022

About the author

Sune Borkfelt lectures at Aarhus University, Denmark. His publications include articles and book chapters on nonhuman otherness, postcolonial animals, the naming of nonhuman animals, and the ethics of animal product marketing. He is also co-author of a critical research-based Danish book on hunting.

Reviews

[Sune Borkfelt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote this book, and I am very happy with it.