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

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

2 Literary Narratives and the Empathics of Slaughter

Delimitations and Definitions

Literary Empathy and Animals: Exclusions and Misconceptions

Empathy and Anonymous Animals

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

(En)Gendered Slaughter