Agentic or Experiencer? The Nonhuman Action in Ecofiction

Abstract

The nonhuman has been widely studied in the humanities and social sciences (Cohen & Lemenager, 2016). While its meaning varies among disciplines and contexts, in literary studies the term nonhuman generally encompasses “plants, animals, spirits, gods, and, more recently, machines” (Thomsen, 2021, p. 909). Within the digital environmental humanities—an emerging field that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between digital and environmental humanities—the nonhuman world, as represented in fiction, media, archives, folklore, poetry, and narratives, has been widely explored through digital technologies (Cohen & Lemenager, 2016; Gould, 2017; Linley, 2016; Ryan et al., 2023; Travis et al., 2022; Zampaki & Karpouzou, 2025). Some DH studies have examined the narrative agency of human fictional characters at scale (Piper, 2024; Soni et al., 2023), analyzing human behavior and movement in literary texts to reveal how agency and mobility are represented in fiction published from 1800 to 2020. By extending this examination of agency to nonhuman figures, we decenter the human and arrive at a more ecologically aware understanding of narrative in ecofiction. Examining how representations of nonhuman animals and plants, and of their agency, span creative works can, in turn, illuminate how various human perceptions of the nonhuman world are constructed.