‘Creatures of elsewhere’: Nicholas Royle’s Quilt and the inhuman novel

Booth, Naomi

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ‘creatures of elsewhere' of Nicholas Royle's first novel, Quilt (2010), primarily the fever of stingrays that preoccupies the novel's narrator. I read the disturbing power of these animals as manifold: the rays elicit and elude the language of this text, always moving beyond the narrator's attempts at description; the novel becomes a site of disorientating linguistic abundance-even, or perhaps especially, when contending with ecological collapse. Royle reconstitutes narration around the ray, turns it into ‘quilted thinking' and reading Quilt invites us to re-think the form of the novel through the animal, to re-imagine storytelling as anti-anthropomorphic. I connect the extraordinary motility of Quilt to Royle's own theories of the novel in Veering; to Leo Bersani's ideas of the ‘jouissance of otherness' and ‘alien ecstasy' (2009) and to Geoffrey Hill's description of poetry as an ‘alien being’ (2001). In place of literature as humanist, anthropocentric and ego-endorsement, Quilt gives us a vision of reading and writing as inhuman proliferation. Royle re-forms the novel as a restless, alien force.

Citation

Booth, N. (2025). ‘Creatures of elsewhere’: Nicholas Royle’s Quilt and the inhuman novel. Textual Practice, 39(4), 535-540. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2025.2488195

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 31, 2025
• Online Publication Date: May 13, 2025
• Publication Date: 2025-04
• Deposit Date: Jun 12, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 12, 2025
• Journal: Textual Practice
• Print ISSN: 0950-236X
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1308
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 39
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 535-540
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2025.2488195
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4096300