In this article I argue that Donna Haraway’s theories of the Chthulucene and the cyborg can be used as a lens through which to view a selection of Ted Hughes’s children’s writing and to consider what effect this may have upon the child audience. Donna Haraway’s theory of kin will be aligned with Hughes’s children’s collection Meet My Folks! (1961).[1]

Haraway’s theory of kin means building relationships with entities and species other than those tied by ancestry and genealogy, paying particular attention to the idea of tentacular thinking and mutual entanglements with both nonhuman and ‘other’ species. She writes that ‘Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate’.[2] Furthermore, I note that Hughes foreshadows Haraway with his own ideas of ‘meshes’ and entanglements between human and nonhuman entities.

Haraway’s concept of ‘natureculture’ focuses on companion species and traces the different ways in which humans can ‘become’ one as we connect to all that is nonhuman. This concept opens up a dialogue between the human, animal and nature because it highlights that humanity does not equate to superiority, but is instead mixed up in relations between species that should not be separated. By blurring what we consider culture and nature, we stop taking for granted what has been previously set out as fact by humans. When we extend the subjectivity of the human to include a fusion with nonhuman entities, the ‘traditional’ human being is thoroughly disputed. As Haraway states, ‘A dialogue commences interrogating the intimate experiences found in the boundaries between culture/nature, human/nonhuman, organic/inorganic. From this vantage point, we can see ourselves as fully implicated in the world and as cohabiters with others.’[3]

Whilst Haraway acknowledges an acceptance of the Anthropocene, I argue here that her development of the term ‘Chthulucene’ is more usefully applicable to Hughes’s children’s writing. The origin of the term ‘Cthulhu’ stems from the fictional cosmic entity created in 1928 by H. P. Lovecraft.[4] Echoing the Greek word ‘chthonic’ (‘of the Earth’), the creature in his story The Call of Cthulhu has a malevolent personality. Due to Lovecraft’s outspoken racism however, Haraway denies any relation to his Cthulhu-monster and uses the change of spelling to reflect this difference when describing her theory. She writes,

I am calling all this the Chthulucene - past, present, and to come […] the diverse earthwide tentacular powers and forces and collected things. […] ‘My’ Chthulucene […] includes the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as- humus […] some of the many thousand names proper to a vein that Lovecraft could not have imagined or embraced.[5]

As Gough and Adsit-Morris note,

By focusing on what she dislikes about Lovecraft’s ‘misogynist racial-nightmare monster’, Haraway overlooks his contributions to a rich vein of creative artistry […]  In ‘The Call of Chthulhu’, (1928) Lovecraft hints at his familiarity with early 20th-century art movements in his description of sensitive artists being moved by visions to create artworks that only ‘the vagaries of cubism and futurism’ come close to describing.[6]

It is impossible then, to deny any relation to Lovecraft’s idea, when it is obvious that Haraway has adapted and reconfigured this weird entity, primarily using an example of his tentacular thinking with her reference to the spider Pimoa cthulu. Through this, Haraway illustrates the point of loopy tendrils, roots and routes and continuous spinning around to describe ‘tentacularity […] wound with abyssal and dreadful graspings […] in the generative recursions that make up living and dying’.[7] Haraway illustrates this theory further to describe that ‘Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.’[8] Savi then develops this theory by relating it to the theory of evolution whereby ‘everything is connected to something, irrespective of genetic binding’.[9] Haraway’s Chthuhlucene is used as one of the central concerns of ecocriticism here; and it is argued that the Chthulucene replaces the Anthropocene. It is important to note, however, that the ideas of the Anthropocene allow writers and theorists to think about place, scale, planet and ecological interconnection. As Reddick tells in her recent book, ‘Defining the Anthropocene is a decision loaded with cultural, political, and ethical implications. This means that scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences are well placed to enter the debate.’[10]

Haraway however, suggests that, unlike the Anthropocene, making ‘kin’ is of the upmost importance in the Chthulucene. She writes that, ‘Kin making is making persons, not necessarily as individuals or as humans […] the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense’.[11] The effect of this idea deepens our connection to, and responsibility for, other species, and reevaluates the anthropocentrism of many narratives told about humankind. Haraway states that;

The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; […] I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge. Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge. So, I think a big new name, actually more than one name, is warranted.[12]

Whilst the Anthropocene refers to humans as being the single most influential species on the planet and responsible for causing significant global warming, Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ presents a radically different interpretation. She argues that the Anthropocene is too focused on the future and that there should be no clear distinctions drawn between humanity and the nonhuman world, and that there needs to be a relentless focus on the present.[13] Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene. Many argue that the Capitalocene is more appropriate term than the Anthropocene, as it signifies capitalism as a way of organising nature in a competitive world-ecology. Steering away from these dominant and competing theories however, I argue that the Chthulucene is a more appropriate mechanism for debating multispecies importance and the possibility of living harmoniously between human and nonhuman. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in precarious human-driven times attempting to merge the ‘self’ and ‘other’ binary.[14] 

Haraway’s tentacular thinking, entanglement theories and multispecies importance can all be applied to particular children’s writings by Hughes, given that throughout his career he made interconnections between nature and culture through ecologically-charged messages. Reddick notes,

When Hughes is at his most prescient of post-humanist theories, he deconstructs a human-centered sense of our species as superior to others. […] By turns humorous, unsettling and radically green, these thoughts have potentially profound implications for the way we treat other species.[15]

Hughes’s early children’s poems, Meet My Folks! describe each member of an extraordinarily strange family, often in comical ways. As Bate suggests however, ‘His feelings about his mother […] were too deep and complicated to capture: she is the one absence from the feast of Meet My Folks!’[16] When describing the assortment of poems in a 1959 letter to Esther and Leonard Baskin, Hughes writes, ‘The general drift of the poems is – “Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel”’.[17]

‘My Other Granny’[18] embodies vivid images of mutual entanglements with the Grandma character who happens to be an octopus, linking her tentacles between nonhuman and the human narrator. The poem opens matter-of-factly:

My Granny is an Octopus

At the bottom of the sea

And when she comes to supper

She brings her family. (ll.1-4).

The imagery given to the child reader presents the normality of the Granny being an octopus and a viable part of the human family. This is further developed when Hughes writes:

Some of her cousins are lobster

Some floppy jelly fish –

What would you be if your family tree

Grew out of such a dish? (ll.13-16).

This  poem asks children how they would respond if their relatives were indeed sea creatures and allows for the idea of acceptance of the nonhuman as mutual Kin, supporting Haraway’s desire for ‘flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages’.[19] Throughout Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble she discusses the octopus through a symbolic lens, stating, ‘Octopuses are called spiders of the seas, not only for their tentacularity, but also for their predatory habits’.[20]The comparison between spiders and octopus relates back to Haraway’s ideas of mutual entanglement between animal species and human and nonhuman entities. She continues, ‘They are good figures for the luring, beckoning, gorgeous, finite, dangerous precarities of the Chthulucene […] Mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral reefs.’[21] In line with Haraway’s entanglement between human and nonhuman, Hughes’s octopus-Granny can be read in a similar way. The poem continues with the narrator’s father asking the octopus-Granny how things are ‘Down in the marvellous deep?’ (l. 29). In response ‘Her face swells up, her eyes bulge huge/And she begins to weep’. (ll. 30-31). Hughes’s choice of an octopus highlights the emotional intelligence of the animal-human character of the poem. As Adams and Burbeck write, ‘Adult octopuses are clever, adaptable and rapid learners. Experts speculate that most octopus behaviors are learned independently rather than being based on instinct.’[22] In light of this, the octopus-granny possesses the emotional capability to differentiate between the nonhuman and human worlds and therefore evokes great sadness at that realisation that she will never fully be part of the human family. The poem closes: 

Then out of her eyes there bring two drops

That plop into her saucer –

And that is all she manages,

And my Dad knows he can’t force her.

And when they’ve gone, my ocean-folk,

No man could prove they came –

For the sea-tears in her saucer

And a man’s tears are the same. (ll.36-44).

The motif of the octopus-Granny crying into her saucer challenges the child audience to question why she could be upset, yet again confirms that she acknowledges that she will always be ‘other’ compared to her human family. The comparison to a man’s tears as being the same as her ‘sea-tears’ also links with mutual entanglements and kinship between the human family and their nonhuman relatives. The humans are accepting and respectful of her. This, despite her physical differences, aligns with Haraway’s call for the flattening of any supposed interspecies hierarchy and that although ‘Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar.’[23]

Haraway’s theory of ‘self’ and ‘other’ can also be applied to Hughes’s children’s story Timmy The Tug.[24]Hughes’s collaboration with Downer dates to 1952, when they both had flats at 18 Rugby Street. Downer describes their relationship:

We both had the Yorkshireman’s puritan work ethic; we had both spent our teenage years walking the wild parts of the country. […] Ted, always generous, was kind about the verses, and then quietly asked if I would like him to provide his own version […] somehow, I did not get Timmy back from Ted. I was leading a busy life, and so was he, we had moved on into different worlds.[25]

More than fifty years later, Hughes’s widow, Carol Hughes, found Hughes’s original manuscript and returned it to Downer.[26] The story was subsequently published in 2009, complete with Downer’s watercolours, bringing to light an enchanting and appealing tale for children.

Hughes’s verse recounts how Timmy is a tugboat who manages to escape from his moorings and enjoy adventures on the high seas. It begins:

 Timmy the Tug sat patiently there.

The ropes rubbed sore, his rivets ached.

He was up to his eyes in oil and tar.

[…]

This was more than he could stand.

He closed his eyes, he counted ten:

“I’d be far better off as a house on land,

Or a triangle in a bad brass band,

At least I’d be useful then.” (TT 4).

Timmy’s outlook is pitiful. Once loved and enjoyed by his owner, he has been discarded for a faster, newer and more aesthetically pleasing model. Timmy is given human emotions as the text rejects any notion of the boat as being ‘other’. The use of entanglement in Haraway’s terms is applicable here, supporting her theory that ‘Kin is making person, not necessarily as individuals or humans’.[27] When discussing kin and companionship, she uses all manner of man-made objects, and so, the man-made entity of Timmy the tug boat relates to the necessary and often inquisitive human relationship with the ocean. Feeling challenged and hopeful, Timmy has an idea:

He would escape! At his fierce look

The gulls hid in a cloud,

The quays trembled, the harbour shook.

He would escape! (TT 6).

The sense of defiance emanating from Timmy scares even the gulls while his impending escape potentially brings a sense of hope and happiness for the implied child reader. Various encounters of struggle then ensue where Timmy feels responsible to save stranded ships:

The waves grew higher, the sea grew deeper,

But he never once looked back.

[…]

‘You shall not long sit high and dry,

I’ll set you sailing perfectly.’

Here was his chance at last. (TT 18).

The heroic portrayal of Timmy encourages the child audience to feel involved with his endeavours at sea, seeing him more as a human character with a boy’s name, rather than an inanimate object. Onwards Timmy sails and experiences the power and ferocity of nature.

Timmy sailed on, and on further,

Into the dark North.

All the weather was foul weather,

Tumbling the geese and the clouds together

For all it was worth.

The hail fell. There was no sun.

Like a hammer the wind beat.

But Timmy sang as he sailed on:

‘I’m more than a match for anyone

Or anything I may meet.’ (TT 26).

The descriptions of nature provide terrifying yet awe-inspiring imagery. In spite of this, the humanised Timmy has determined feelings in the face of the ferocity of nature. As Cochrane writes, ‘The feeling that comes from confronting something […] uncompromising, hostile or just profoundly indifferent. And this can be grasped in a single perceptual experience that startles or overwhelms the spectator, or it can emerge more slowly in contemplation.’[28] The effect of Timmy’s robust attitude and his inability to be deterred by ‘foul weather’ presents a positive outlook and this anthropomorphic behaviour is intended to be inspirational for children. The story then closes with Timmy finding a female boat companion after rescuing her from rough waters:

High with pride is Timmy’s prow

As home he leads his lady now

The happiest tug in the land. (TT 33).

This passage brings Timmy’s story to a happy end, giving the child audience the sense of a traditional and satisfied resolution. The depiction of Timmy throughout praises his determined personality.

Even though he is nonhuman, Timmy is given consciousness, emotional intelligence and a life partner, thereby having much in common with Hughes’s Iron Man (1968) which discussed below) who is a manufactured man-made entity, but one which is humanised throughout the novel. Haraway’s theory of the cyborg allows a further nature/culture binary and includes a crucial and compelling discussion of the relationship with ‘self’ and ‘other’. The respect for non-human ‘other’ objects and subsequent mutual entanglements is most strongly felt through Hughes’s children’s books, The Iron Man (1968) and The Iron Woman (1993).[29] The term ‘cyborg’ originated out of the emergent field of cybernetics in the work of Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the 1960s. They imagined the cyborgian man-machine hybrid would be needed in the next great technohumanist challenge - space flight. They proposed to ‘allow man to optimize his internal regulation to suit the environment he may seek […] we propose the term “Cyborg”’.[30] From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. Because of this, nature and culture are reworked as the cyborg theory unpicks this binary.

Perhaps the most significant text which supports the abolition of the nature/culture binary through the depiction of the cyborg is Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1991).[31] She argues that, ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’.[32] Haraway also argues that the cyborg is ‘simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’.[33] The theory allows for an interrogation of the boundaries between human and nonhuman and from this vantage point, we can see ourselves as fully implicated in the world as cohabiters with ‘others’ participating as equal subjects rather than objects. The Cyborg Manifesto, aims to fight the oppression of the Anthropocene, by placing cyborgs within the Chthulucene. As previously discussed, throughout his children’s writing, Hughes has much in common with Haraway’s ‘Kin’ where cohabitation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is key and where the effect on the child audience encourages an understanding of the need for a mutual respect among species.

            Hughes’s children’s novels The Iron Man and The Iron Woman both reconfigure kinship by engaging with an urgent ecological crisis at their core. This moves our perceptions away from - the anthropocentric belief that humans are the central and most important entity in the universe to biocentricism, which presents a more ethical point of view by extending inherent value to all living things. Kerslake aptly asserts that,

Instead of writing about a physical nature that is untouched and separate from a human being, [Hughes’s] poetry bridges the gap between the human and the non-human allowing the reader to cross the boundaries between both worlds.[34]

Hughes’s strange tales of the giant Iron Man and Iron Woman are halfway between a modern fairy-tale and science-fiction, depicting intelligent robots that engage with human society. According to Solnick’s reading, ‘For Hughes, the human being is a “prosthetic creature” and frequently a “technological animal”’.[35] This combination of both technological and animalistic qualities of the Iron Man assigns attributes of man-made advancement whilst also emphasizing human qualities such as naivety and innocence. Hughes offers a story that positions machines ambiguously in the centre of human technological progress, taking time to describe the disjointed and inhuman nature of the Iron Man, whilst at the same time attributing a humanised quality. As Solnick identifies,

In 1968 Hughes published The Iron Man, a children’s parable about technology and biological energy in which a metal giant becomes the world’s defender: The Iron Man’s arrival on the first page positions technology as not under human control but always ready on the scene.[36]

In the story, the Iron Man falls from the cliff and is subsequently submerged in the ocean. This speaks to a strength and survival far beyond the scope of humans, who could not endure such a fall:

His iron legs fell off. His iron arms broke off, and the hands broke off the arms. His great iron ears fell off and his eyes fell out. His great iron head fell off. […] The bits and pieces of the Iron Man lay scattered far and wide, silent and unmoving. (IM 2-3).

The vulnerability of the Iron Man at the beginning of the story helps children become involved and concerned with his welfare. The Iron Man is instead a creature situated in time and place, part of a material web which Haraway describes as ‘becoming-with’.[37] However, he also represents a future world and the idea that the organism of ‘life’ no longer has human self-defined boundaries.

The protagonist of the story is a child, Hogarth, who operates as a cipher for the openness of childhood and a hope for humanity, and is assisted by the mechanical ‘other’, the Iron Man. What emerges is a hybrid of machine and organism as Hogarth navigates the mechanised ‘other’ before him. For Haraway, it is the cyborg that offers an answer to the ‘discredited breach of nature and culture’, but for Hughes that job ultimately falls into the hands of a child. [38]

As the story progresses, it poses the idea of humans acknowledging and living-with multispecies and nonhuman kindreds, where ‘multispecies flourishing requires a robust […] sensibility’.[39] Although ‘The Iron Man would go out, as the champion of the earth, against this monster from space’ (IM 47), his antagonist, the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon, is treated as distinctly ‘other’ from the rest of the characters: ‘But it wasn’t surprising. This creature has come from the depths of space out of the heart of a star.’ (IM 45). Nonetheless, the end of the story, where ‘the Iron Man is deemed the world’s hero’ (IM 61), points towards a desire for multispecies harmony. Hughes explains:

I created a parable in which the child’s own nature and the Iron Man, who is a giant of the technological world, and the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon, who is a monster from the depths of living matter, are fitted together into a working whole.[40]

Hughes further develops this by writing:

The basic idea […] is to dramatise […] centres of ‘power.’ One is the child’s nature --- the child’s sense of himself. Another is the giant Robot of Technology --- terrifying and destructive, uncontrollable and inhuman, unless it is approached without fear, but with patience and good sense […] approached without fear but with firmness, superior courage, open-mindedness, cunning and kindness.[41]

The emphasis on the terms ‘without fear’ and ‘superior courage’ encourage the child reader to accept nonhuman entities as equals. Ultimately, The Iron Man develops an ecological imperative that highlights how technology could be used to overcome the problems of industrialisation and to promote the heal the human relationship with nature. Iron Man can be viewed as a symbol of healing and peace, to break the fusion of man and mechanism:

Suddenly the world became wonderfully peaceful […] they stopped making weapons. The countries began to think how they could live pleasantly alongside each other, rather than how to get rid of each other’ (IM 62).

This presents a further layer of kin-making between humans themselves. The conclusion therefore places nature and culture in harmony and encourages children to show open-mindedness and to overcome fear and see these as tools to accept others.

            Hughes’s sequel to The Iron Man, The Iron Woman, also transcends boundaries between the artificial and natural. Despite a somewhat simplistic plot, the incorporation of surreal cybernetic fantasy for children allows readers to re-evaluate and rethink the relationships between human and ‘other’. The Iron Woman is described in many multi-layered ways in comparison to the Iron Man who is simply iron:

The black shape was the size of two or three elephants. It looked like a hippopotamus-headed, gigantic dinosaur, dragging itself on all fours up out of a prehistoric tar pit. But now, still like a dinosaur, it sat upright. And all at once it looked human – immense but human. […] A truly colossal, man-shaped statue of black mud, raking itself and groaning. (IW 4-5)

The image of the animal becoming human rejects any notion of ‘other’ and instead opens the way to developing her as increasingly human throughout the story. In addition, the Iron Woman knows the foolishness of separating the technical from the human. When Lucy asks, ‘Are you a robot? […] Perhaps, she thought, somebody far off is controlling this creature, from a panel of dials. Perhaps she’s a sort of human-shaped submarine […]’ (IW 18), the Iron Woman responds by saying, ‘“I am not a robot […] I am the real thing’” (IW 18). This links with Haraway’s thinking which, as Alaimo and Hekman point out, ‘is replete with “material-semiotic actors” and such rich and revealing figures as the cyborg. […] Her essay […] takes on the question of what “nature” means in the complex practices of contemporary society.’[42] Further, in line with Haraway’s theory of mutual entanglements, Hughes describes the Iron Woman as, ‘This immense creature seemed to be made entirely of black slime, with reeds and tendrils of roots clinging all over’ (IW 14). This presents the Iron Woman as both organically made from the Earth as well as manufactured and inorganic, once again highlighting Hughes’s erasure of the tension between natural and artificial. 

As in The Iron Man, Hughes uses a child as the protagonist in The Iron Woman. It is Lucy who ‘Saw that this huge being was a woman. It was exactly as if the rigid jet of water were carving this gleaming, black, giant woman out of a cliff of black clay’ (IW 15). The Iron Woman’s face belies her robotic construction, while her curiously opaque assurance of ‘realness’ sets her apart from other integrations of human and machine.

Haraway’s idea of kinship is anticipated in The Iron Woman, when the titular character turns the male characters into fish so that they may experience the same pain as the creatures in the poisoned river. By turning the men into giant water-animals, they literally become-animal and completely entangled with the nonhuman. As Solnick observes, ‘Here technology engenders an engagement with otherness, thereby transforming behaviour toward industrial technologies and improving the ways humans adapt to, and adapt, the ecosystem’.[43] In this context, Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ can once again be applied to show that Hughes’s cyborg-goddess, Iron Woman, symbolises a source of energy and life. She fights against the oppression of the Anthropocene and simultaneously educates children about the importance of living respectfully with and among the nonhuman. Further, when Lucy contacts Hogarth to help him and the Iron Man fight the pollution caused by humans, he ponders:

He’d often wondered if the Iron Man had any relatives, somewhere. They’d be hidden away, of course. Quite likely in some deep mudhole. Or in the sea. Or inside the earth. After all, the Iron Man had come from somewhere. Why shouldn’t there be others? (IW 30).

The effect of this question allows the child audience to also interrogate The Iron Man as a species rather than a singular and separate entity. Further, the use of ‘relatives’ presents the Iron Man as becoming increasingly humanised, allowing the reader to contemplate that there could be many more versions of himself in the biological sense, rather than only through a mutual respect between other species in relation to Haraway’s ‘kin’. As is the case with the poem ‘My Other Granny’, Hughes is building an alternative idea of family and kin networks.

Hughes also creates a hopeful conclusion to The Iron Woman when the men learn a stark lesson regarding the pollution of nature from their factories. This is perhaps based upon Hughes’s first-hand experience with the poisonous water of the Calder Valley, a hopeful ending which fits well with the historical clean-up of the region:

The Calder, noted during the valley’s industrial heyday for its toxicity and extraordinary colours, resulting from the many mills discharging effluent and dyes into the river. Such pollution lasted up until the 1970s, but happily the River Calder today is much cleaner and healthier.[44]  

The tensions between man, nature and technology is very much at play in Hughes’s children’s novels. He states:

The wish to protect the earth and save life is no part of that machine. Its power-base must be somewhere else, somewhere outside the machine, outside the greeds and the needs. […] For most of history, among most peoples, it has been supplied by the depth of feeling that we call spiritual --- the feeling that mankind and the natural world share a sacred bond, not to be violated.[45]

Hughes’s tension between his opposition to the use of machinery and machines and his desire to protect the Earth and its landscapes is reflected in his use of nonhuman machine entities in the Iron Man and the Iron Woman to create healing and hope for humanity. Hughes’s justification for the use of a machine, rather than a human, can be aligned to Haraway’s thinking that the human and the machine are actually integrated entities. She writes, ‘It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines.’[46]

As the Earth moves closer to an official geological Anthropocene epoch, marking humanity’s irreversible impact upon the planet, it is important to recognise that Hughes’s writing for children sought to empower them as open-minded environmental activists. His attempts to provide them with an appreciation of the nonhuman world is something which could and should be adopted in our present times times. Even Hughes himself however, remained ominously sceptical of the human response to profound environmental change: ‘If the human race fails to survive all this it will be because it can’t get interested in its own annihilation. Too interested in something else, presumably. As leopards go I suppose it’s not likely to change its spots.’[47]

In this paper, my aim has been to show that Haraway’s theory of the Chthulucene and her ideas of the cyborg can offer new insights into a selection of Hughes’s writing for children. I hope to have shown that his literary reach remains current and relevant for diverse child audiences who are living in an era of intensifying extinction and sadly, continual disjunctions between the human and nonhuman world.

[1] Ted Hughes, Meet My Folks! (London: Faber & Faber, 1961).

[2] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 2.

[3] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1991), p. 181.

[4] H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin Classics, 2002).

[5] Haraway, Trouble, pp.100-1.

[6] Noel Gough, Chessa Adsit-Morris, ‘Troubling the Anthropocene: Donna Haraway, Science Fiction, and Arts of Un/Naming’ Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 20 3 (2020), 213-224 (p. 219).

[7] Haraway, Trouble, p. 33.

[8] Haraway, Trouble, p. 31.

[9] Melina Pereina Savi, ‘The Anthropocene (and) (in) the Humanities: Possibilities for Literary Studies,’ Estudos Feministas, 25 2 (2017), 945-959 (p. 949).

[10] Yvonne Reddick, Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment, and Planet (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

[11] Haraway, Trouble, p. 103.

[12] Haraway, Trouble, pp. 100-1.

[13] Haraway, Trouble, p. 110.

[14] The use of ‘self and ‘other’ is portrayed through Hughes’s children’s writing such as The Iron Woman (1993) and will be explored through Haraway’s cyborg theory later in this chapter.

[15] Yvonne Reddick, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) pp. 37-8.

[16] Jonathan Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (New York: Harper, 2015), p. 45.

[17] Hughes ‘to Esther and Leonard Baskin,’ Early July 1959 in Letters of Ted Hughes ed. by Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 147.  

[18] Ted Hughes, Collected Poems for Children (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 43-4.

[19] Haraway, Trouble, p. 101.

[20] Haraway, Trouble, p. 55.

[21] Haraway, Trouble, p. 55.

[22] Sam S. Adams, Steve Burbeck ‘Beyond the Octopus: From General Intelligence toward a Human-like Mind’ in Theoretical Foundations of Artificial General Intelligence eds. Pei Wang and Ben Goertzel, (Amsterdam: Atlantis Press, 2012), pp. 49-65, (p. 51). 

[23] Haraway, Trouble, p. 103.

[24] Jim Downer and Ted Hughes, Timmy the Tug (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2009).

[25] Downer, Timmy The Tug, Afterword.

[26] Lorraine Kerslake, ‘Hughes’s Collaboration with Artists’ in Ted Hughes in Context ed. by Terry Gifford, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 133-142, (p. 133).

[27] Haraway, Trouble, p. 103.

[28] Tom Cochrane, ‘The Emotional Experience of the Sublime Author (s)’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 42 2 (2012), 125-148 (p. 130).

[29] Ted Hughes, The Iron Man: A Story in Five Nights (London: Faber and Faber, 1968)./ Ted Hughes, The Iron Woman (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).

[30] Manfred E. Clynes, Nathan S. Kline ‘Cyborgs and Space,’ Astronautics (1960), 26-76 (p. 25).

[31] Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[32] Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto, p. 4.

[33] Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto, p. 6.

[34] Lorraine Kerslake, The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children: Correcting Culture’s Error (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 6-7.

[35] Sam Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary British and Irish poetry (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 12. 

[36] Solnick, Anthropocene, p. 33.

[37] Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 3.

[38] Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto, p. 68.

[39] Haraway, Species, p. 90.

[40] Ted Hughes, ‘The Interpretation of Parables’ Signal, (1992), 69, pp. 147- 152, (p. 150).

[41] BL Add MS 88918/7/1.

[42] Stacey Alaimo, Susan Hekman ‘Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory’ in Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader: Routledge Literature Readers ed. by Ken Hiltner (Routledge: UK and USA, 2015) pp. 143-153, (p. 149).

[43] Solnick, Anthropocene, p. 72.

[44] John Billingsley, A Laureate’s Landscape: Walks Around Ted Hughes’ Mytholmroyd (Hebden Bridge: Northern Earth, 2007), p. 27.

[45] London, British Library, Add MS 88918/6/12 Non-fiction drafts 25 Feb, 1993: No. ’40.’

[46] Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto, p. 60.

[47] BL Add MS 88918/2/1.