One day in seminar, literature scholar Laura Brown imposed a limit on the discussion: for an entire class on Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” no one could mention a human character.

“We found that the book was full of other-than-human beings: objects, structures, spaces, natural phenomena,” said Brown, the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “We had to ask ourselves: what are these other-than-human beings and things doing in this book? Are they simply serving the human protagonists, simply advancing their plot? No, much more was happening, and we needed to know what and how."

Brown, whose recent research looks beyond “the singular, autonomous, rational, human protagonist,” finds that many other-than-human presences appear in literature – with a lot to say to human readers and scholars. In “The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature,” she traces ways the nonhuman – including weather, natural disasters, animals, even the concepts like love – offer an alternative realm which exceeds human understanding or order.

The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Brown about the book.

Read the interview on the College of Arts and Sciences website.