Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture

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, Sámi 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.

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.