Introduction: Emplaced Readerly Devotions

Abstract

Literature offers readers a way to respond to the ethical and environmental damage caused by privileging some humans over other animals. Affective texts can dream with their readers in surprising ways that unsettle the privileging of one species over another. Such dream writing invites readers to imagine themselves as the vulnerable animals they are, co-dependent with other species in a shared and fragile world. In Emily Brontë’s dream-written Wuthering Heights (1847), the possibility emerges of humans being responsive to and with the intra-active and entangled responses of other animals. A range of adaptations follow this aspect of Brontë’s novel, by making allowances for dynamic and generative exchanges between creatures and their habitats in their works. When readers respond to such depictions, they too might question anthropo-theological thinking and open to the co-affective allure of other creatures.