The European cultural heritage from the early modern era is full of colonial content. For instance, “exotic” animals, trafficked to Europe from the colonies, often appear as motifs in paintings and sculptures. This is the case in the oil painting Two Chained Monkeys by Bruegel the Elder from 1562. Through the centuries, the two monkeys in the painting have been interpreted in different ways: as material proof of the owner’s worldwide power, as religious symbols of the debased human, or as political metaphors for human warfare and imprisonment. With her ekphrastic poem “Bruegel’s Two Monkeys” (1957), the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska breaks this trend of “symptomatic interpretation” and reads the monkeys as monkeys. As I argue in the chapter, Szymborska hereby makes the type of critical “surface reading” for which the academic field of human-animal studies generally aims. Szymborska’s poem, furthermore, creatively rearranges the painting’s scenery, thereby effectively blocking the anthropocentric-colonial gaze and creating new space for the monkeys’ agency. Principally, the chapter argues that artistic and academic endeavors may have mutually supportive functions in their acts of critically revisiting and rereading the cultural heritage from the colonial era.

An important task for scholars of cultural studies and the humanities, as well as for artistic creators, is to refigure the frames and concepts by which the world as we know it is kept in place. Without these acts of refiguration, the future could only ever be more of the (violent) same. In close dialogue with literary and cinematic works and practices, the essays of this volume help refigure and rethink such pressing contemporary issues as migration, inequality, racism, post-coloniality, political violence and human-animal relations. A range of fresh perspectives are introduced, amounting to a call for intellectuals to remain critically engaged with the social and planetary.

This collection maps out the current state of the field of literary and cultural animal studies in Northern Europe. With contributors from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Poland, and Sweden, the work spans a wide variety of issues regarding human and non-human life in relation to different kinds of cultural expression, while others are more general in character. Above all others, one urgent and overarching question is addressed: How can we challenge the current anthropocentric paradigm in ways that benefit the production of less violent, more ethically sound and sustainable knowledge regarding the relationship between human and non-human life?   

Ratatϙskr, in Norse mythology, is a squirrel that scurries up and down Yggdrasil (the tree of life), carrying messages between the dragon at its roots and the eagle at its top. Being a representation  of a ‘real’ animal species, but also a part of the mythology organizing the human world, Ratatϙskr is ideally situated for literary and cultural animal studies. Apart from directing the scope of interest towards Northern Europe, this figure reminds us that the “squirrelling” and storage of productive and just knowledge about all forms of life is an important undertaking if there is to be a future for any of them.

Zoopoetic studies investigate “texts that are, in one way or another, predicated upon an engagement with animals and animality (human and nonhuman),” to quote Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffman. A central question in this field concerns the relation between language and species. This article suggests that two basic views can be discerned: one that conceptualizes language as a human-specific capacity, and another that frames language as a broader phenomenon that humans and most other species have in common. These two starting points – the first accentuating differences, the second emphasizing similarities – give rise to two different approaches to zoopoetry. In the first case, zoopoetry is associated with the deconstruction of human semantics and, thus, of human power. In the second case, zoopoetry is seen as an experiment in which the attentive human poet comes together with animals in a natural act of mutual poiesis.

The aim of the article is to uncover the genealogy of these two views – here named the “language sceptic” perspective and the “language affirmative” perspective, respectively – and to problematize them as scholarly reading positions. Using examples from Les Murray’s animal poetry, the article argues that the two perspectives might more fruitfully be explored as two dimensions that exist and create interesting friction within zoopoetic texts – hence an oscillation between the perspectives is preferable.