Further Reading
A book like Endlings is only possible thanks to decades of scholarship conducted by people in a plethora of disciplines. I am immensely grateful that so many scholars and storytellers have so generously shared their work, their time, and their expertise with me for Endlings.
I found myself interested in exploring endlings as a topic after reading Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2020 translation of Beowulf. I came across her use of the word extinct in the text to be fantastically striking and offered—to my thinking—a connection between a very old piece of literature and the nature of living in an Age of Endlings in the Anthropocene today. Her translation made me wonder what other characters and stories could shape and be shaped by the those that are “the last of their kind.”
This project hopes to build on such brilliant, painstaking work—to bring together examples and ideas from different disciplines to highlight ways that we could talk about endlings and storytelling. The references that I’ve included in the project’s bibliography are in no way meant to be considered a comprehensive literature review on any of the topics in this book; they are simply the sources that I drew from most directly from for the project’s text.
For readers who are interested in a deeper dive into these topics, I would recommend the following:
Fuller, Errol. Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Hennessy, Elizabeth. On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019.
Jørgensen, Dolly. Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019.
Paddle, Robert. The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of the Thylacine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Turvey, Samuel. Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.