Beastly Modernisms
The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture
Published on 30. November 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-1-4744-9803-6 (ISBN)
Description
The intersection of modernist studies and critical animal studies is a new, progressive field that raises crucial questions about what it means to live with animals in modernity. Beastly Modernisms gathers essays from leading figures in the field alongside emerging scholars who, together, revisit canonical figures and decentre the canons and geographies of modernism. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches, the contributions work with cultural history and theoretical frameworks to unearth the multispecies dynamics of twentieth-century literature and culture.
The chapters in Beastly Modernisms present a diverse range of approaches and topics, exploring dogs in Virginia Woolf to Republican China, animals and gender in surrealism to African-American texts, Sami reindeer to rat propaganda, modernist jellyfish to metamodernist beasts, 1940s poetry to Indian Partition stories, charting the current and future state of modernist animal studies.
The chapters in Beastly Modernisms present a diverse range of approaches and topics, exploring dogs in Virginia Woolf to Republican China, animals and gender in surrealism to African-American texts, Sami reindeer to rat propaganda, modernist jellyfish to metamodernist beasts, 1940s poetry to Indian Partition stories, charting the current and future state of modernist animal studies.
Reviews / Votes
Overall, these scholars offer a fascinating analysis of the ways in which writers use nonhuman animals to explore and contest the traditional limits of modernism. All of the volume's essays are informed by sophisticated theoretical positions, but most are clearly written enough for determined undergraduates-although graduate students may find the volume more useful. -- R. D. Morrison, Morehead State University * CHOICE * A major contribution to animal studies as well as modernist studies, Beastly Modernisms gathers international perspectives that strategically redeploy modern profusions of beastliness - whether within, without, or betwixt and between (sometimes human) animals - in ways geared to advance timely feminist, antiracist, and decolonial critiques. -- Susan McHugh, University of New EnglandMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
4 black and white illustrations, 6 colour illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
476 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4744-9803-6 (9781474498036)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature & Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019),Technology, Literature and Culture (2011) and Modernist Articulations: a cultural study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022), Reading Westworld (2019) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009). Saskia McCracken completed her PhD on Virginia Woolf's Darwinian animal tropes at the University of Glasgow. Her research has been published in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture: 1880-1950 (2021), Modernism/Modernity: Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction (2022), Animal Satire (2022), Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human, and Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene. She also transcribed the first manuscript draft of Flush: A Biography for the Cambridge edition.
Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beastly Modernisms
Saskia McCracken and Alex Goody
Part I: Companion Species
1. Metamodernist Beasts, or Flush's Future: Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals and Sigrid Nunez's Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
Derek Ryan
2. Can Flush Count?: Virginia Woolf, Animality and Numbers
Jane Goldman
3. Canine Companions, Race and Affective Anthropomorphism in Florence Ayscough's The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (1926) and Mary Gaunt's A Broken Journey (1919)
Juanjuan Wu
Part II: Beastly Traces
4. Making an Impression Deeply: Authorising Animals in D. H. Lawrence
Carrie Rohman
5. Following the Beast Familiar: Djuna Barnes's Family Dramas
Peter Adkins
6. The Taxidermic Imaginary in Modernist Literature
Paul Fagan
Part III: Animal, Nation, Empire
7. Species Cleansing: The Rhetoric of Rat Control in the People's Republic of Poland 1945-1956
Gabriela? Jarzebowska
8. The Barking Dog and Crying Bird in Partition Stories: Beastly Modernism and the Subaltern Animism of Manto, Rakesh and Anand
Beerendra Pandey
9. Resistant Reindeers: Human-Animal Relations and Cultural Self-Appropriation in Sami Art and Literature
Katharina Alsen
Part IV: Intersections, Encounters
10. Animal-Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories of Charles G. D. Roberts
Lauren Cullen
11. Encountering Female Human Animal Becomings in Leonora Carrington's Surrealist Hybrid Tales
Karen Eckersley
12. Modern Intersections: Reading Anita Scott Coleman's Animals
Elizabeth Curry
Part V: Extinction, War, Proliferation
13. 1940s Avian Noir
Laura Blomvall
14. Unhoming the Pigeon: Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi
Caroline Hovanec
15. The Modernist Jellyfish
Rachel Murray
Afterword: The Animal in the Mirror
Kari Weil
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beastly Modernisms
Saskia McCracken and Alex Goody
Part I: Companion Species
1. Metamodernist Beasts, or Flush's Future: Ceridwen Dovey's Only the Animals and Sigrid Nunez's Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
Derek Ryan
2. Can Flush Count?: Virginia Woolf, Animality and Numbers
Jane Goldman
3. Canine Companions, Race and Affective Anthropomorphism in Florence Ayscough's The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (1926) and Mary Gaunt's A Broken Journey (1919)
Juanjuan Wu
Part II: Beastly Traces
4. Making an Impression Deeply: Authorising Animals in D. H. Lawrence
Carrie Rohman
5. Following the Beast Familiar: Djuna Barnes's Family Dramas
Peter Adkins
6. The Taxidermic Imaginary in Modernist Literature
Paul Fagan
Part III: Animal, Nation, Empire
7. Species Cleansing: The Rhetoric of Rat Control in the People's Republic of Poland 1945-1956
Gabriela? Jarzebowska
8. The Barking Dog and Crying Bird in Partition Stories: Beastly Modernism and the Subaltern Animism of Manto, Rakesh and Anand
Beerendra Pandey
9. Resistant Reindeers: Human-Animal Relations and Cultural Self-Appropriation in Sami Art and Literature
Katharina Alsen
Part IV: Intersections, Encounters
10. Animal-Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories of Charles G. D. Roberts
Lauren Cullen
11. Encountering Female Human Animal Becomings in Leonora Carrington's Surrealist Hybrid Tales
Karen Eckersley
12. Modern Intersections: Reading Anita Scott Coleman's Animals
Elizabeth Curry
Part V: Extinction, War, Proliferation
13. 1940s Avian Noir
Laura Blomvall
14. Unhoming the Pigeon: Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi
Caroline Hovanec
15. The Modernist Jellyfish
Rachel Murray
Afterword: The Animal in the Mirror
Kari Weil
Notes on Contributors
Index