Book News: Animals in the writings of the Bloomsbury group

 Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature

BY DEREK RYAN

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781009182973

https://www.cambridge.org/gb/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/bloomsbury-beasts-and-british-modernist-literature

Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualization of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of the human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enriches our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Offers sustained attention on the significance of animals in literary modernism's engagement with zoos, hunting, pets and insects, showing readers how literary animal studies and modernist studies can form a mutually enriching dialogue
• Reassesses the Bloomsbury group's approach to questions of colonialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology through their engagement with human-animal relations
• Provides original close readings informed by archival documents, newspapers, draft manuscripts, literary intertexts, zoological studies, natural history and animal theory

Derek Ryan is senior lecturer in modernist literature at the University of Kent. His previous publications include Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015) and the co-edited volumes The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018) and Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (2019).