The EcoGothic is a new critical field that merges the ecocritical and the Gothic towards a more inclusive, non-anthropocentric understanding of monstrosity. A central focus of the EcoGothic is the role of non human animals, flesh consumption, and speciesism in  the construction of monstrosity and the Gothic aesthetic. Please see the publication of Gothic Studies, 16/1, May 2014:

European and Italian EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century Table of Contents

This special issue of Gothic Studies employs EcoGothic approaches – in particular, Ecofeminist and Vegetarian Critical theory – to focus on the nonhuman animal, evolving (non-)anthropocentric notions of species identity, especially in relation to flesh consumption, food, gender, and race paradigms, monstrous hybridity, and the construction of nation in the Industrial Era. Other issues which might be explored within this framework include metaphors of animal slaughter, populational, evolutionary, and criminal discourses as inscribed on the nonhuman body, and agricultural and environmental issues as addressed by reformist ideologies such as spiritualism, antivivisectionism, and temperance. The volume brings together works by Gothic authors, such as British and Italian, that have generally not approached from a transnational perspective.

And please see the publication of:

Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Situated on the cutting edge of scholarship in a variety of fields, this bracing volume draws together essays on Italian writers and filmmakers whose work engages with nonhuman animal subjectivity. Analyzing works from unification to the present, they address three major strands of current philosophical thought: the perceived borders between man and nonhuman animals, historical and fictional crises facing humanity, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world. These essays are driven by philosophical, theoretical, and ethical questions that interrogate Italian cultural production in provocative new ways, and their analysis has implications not simply for Italianists, but for a range of scholars doing work within cross-disciplinary fields such as animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthuman philosophy.