Literary Primatology: Reading Primatology in Ape Fiction

Abstract

This article aims at defining the field of literary primatology and illustrating the main forms it has taken in Anglophone literatures in the twenty-first century. The article is organized around five sections. The first one introduces the term literary primatology. The second portrays the cultural background against which this field emerged. The third describes its main themes and illustrates them by bringing to the fore significant literary works produced in the twenty-first century. The fourth looks at examples of ape imaginings. Finally, I enumerate some of the unifying characteristics of these narratives and explain literary primatology as one of the responses to today’s Anthropocene anxiety and the feeling of grief or solastalgia for a dying planet.