BOOK NEWS: Modernist studies meet critical animal studies

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

EDITED BY ALEX GOODY AND SASKIA MCCRACKEN

Edinburgh UP, 2023 

ISBN: 9781474498029

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-beastly-modernisms.html

A contemporary collection of scholarly essays exploring the vibrant intersections of modernist studies and critical animal studies

• Presents the diverse range of intersections between modernist and critical animal studies
• Includes cutting-edge research contributions from a heterogenous and interdisciplinary range of modernist scholars
• Offers a key research resource for scholars in modernist studies, critical animal studies and cognate areas
• Provides a classroom-ready collection of essays relevant to undergraduate and graduate courses on modernist writing and critical animal studies

The intersection of modernist studies and critical animal studies is a new and progressive field of enquiry that locates crucial questions about what it means to live with animals at the foundation of modernity. Beastly Modernisms gathers essays from leading figures in the field alongside new and 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. 

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.

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, and chart the current and future state of modernist animal studies.

"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

"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 England

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), and Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human, and Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (2024). She also transcribed the first manuscript draft of Flush: A Biography for the Cambridge edition.