Introduction: Hunting Animals and Multispecies Entanglements—Counter-Narratives of Agency and Empathy from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

With a view to concepts of an animate history, the introduction to “Section III: Female, Male, and Other Animals” focuses on the representation of nonhuman animals in literature and art as agential beings in the cultural practice of the hunt. The first three parts of the chapter understand hunting as a form of human-animal entanglement, where nonhuman animals show themselves as agential beings who are knotted together with human animals in the cultural practice of the hunt. The fourth part then deals with literary and artistic counter-narratives by Matthias Claudius (Letter of a Par Force Hunted Deer, 1777), Fidus (Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1892), and Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, 2009), which stage and expose multispecies entanglements between human hunters and hunted animals instead of denying them. The readings in this last section define a specific form of poetic entanglement, which the narrative and visual representations enact with literary and artistic techniques. I argue that they establish a “female” counter-discourse of empathy with nonhuman animals, identifying them as sentient, vulnerable, and agential fellow creatures rather than as passive objects and resources for humans.