Do Only Cute Extinct Animals Find a Place in Literature?

A siren-like creature from the past has captured the attention of literary circles, drawing readers into the pages of Iida Turpeinen's debut novel, "The Living." The book features Steller's sea cow, a species that vanished just two decades after its discovery by Vitus Bering's crew, who, according to historical accounts, also consumed them. The rapid extinction of this marine mammal, perhaps more than its depiction as a creature that seemed to speak to readers, has fueled fascination.

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The type of books, at least Lunde's books, are quite clear examples in an anthropocene-critical genre within environmental representation. They are clearly didactic, we should understand that this is something terrible. They allude to feelings like melancholy and sorrow and loss.

This focus on vanished species is not new to literature. In recent years, a wave of books, both fiction and narrative non-fiction, have brought extinct and endangered animals to life. Maja Lunde's dystopian climate quartet, beginning with "The History of Bees" in 2016, Patrik Svensson's August Prize-winning "The Gospel of the Eel" (2019), and Lea Korsgaard's butterfly-focused "Before the Year Is Over" (2023) stand out as prominent examples.

Camilla Brudin Borg, an associate professor of literature at the University of Gothenburg specializing in ecocriticism, identifies these works, particularly Lunde's, as clear examples of an "anthropocene-critical" genre in environmental storytelling. She explains that these books are often didactic, aiming to evoke feelings of melancholy, sorrow, and loss to convey the severity of the situation. This aligns with Ursula K. Heise's research in "Imagining Extinction" (2016), which posits that our narratives about species are not just scientific facts but cultural constructions.

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She highlights that how we tell stories about species is not just scientific facts but primarily a cultural construction.

Heise's work suggests that the animals chosen for these elegies are often the cute or majestic ones, rather than those perceived as "disgusting" or insignificant. While the eel in Svensson's book might challenge this notion, Heise's point about cultural construction and inherent value hierarchies within science remains valid. This shift in literary focus reflects a broader trend in eco-literature over the past decade, moving away from anthropocentrism and portraying animals on their own terms, challenging the long-held Cartesian view of animals as unfeeling beings lacking language.

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Yes, I would say so. It has probably come more and more during the last ten years.