Beastly Modernisms

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.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Beastly ModernismsSaskia McCracken and Alex GoodyPart I: Companion Species1. Metamodernist Beasts, or Flush’s Future: Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals and Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of BloomsburyDerek Ryan2. Can Flush Count?: Virginia Woolf, Animality and NumbersJane Goldman3. 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 WuPart II: Beastly Traces4. Making an Impression Deeply: Authorising Animals in D. H. LawrenceCarrie Rohman5. Following the Beast Familiar: Djuna Barnes’s Family DramasPeter Adkins6. The Taxidermic Imaginary in Modernist LiteraturePaul FaganPart III: Animal, Nation, Empire7. Species Cleansing: The Rhetoric of Rat Control in the People’s Republic of Poland 1945–1956Gabriela　 Jarzebowska8. The Barking Dog and Crying Bird in Partition Stories: Beastly Modernism and the Subaltern Animism of Manto, Rakesh and Anand Beerendra Pandey9. Resistant Reindeers: Human–Animal Relations and Cultural Self-Appropriation in Sámi Art and LiteratureKatharina AlsenPart IV: Intersections, Encounters10. Animal–Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories of Charles G. D. RobertsLauren Cullen11. Encountering Female Human Animal Becomings in Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist Hybrid TalesKaren Eckersley12. Modern Intersections: Reading Anita Scott Coleman’s AnimalsElizabeth CurryPart V: Extinction, War, Proliferation13. 1940s Avian NoirLaura Blomvall14. Unhoming the Pigeon: Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in DelhiCaroline Hovanec15. The Modernist JellyfishRachel MurrayAfterword: The Animal in the MirrorKari WeilNotes on ContributorsIndex

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.