The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals surveys the role of animals across literary history and opens conversations on what literature can teach us about more-than-human life. Leading international scholars comprehensively explore how engaging with creatures of various kinds alters our understanding of what it means to write and read, and why this is important for thinking about a series of cultural, ethical, political, and scientific developments and controversies. The first part of the book offers historically rooted arguments about medieval metamorphosis, early modern fleshiness, eighteenth-century imperialism, Romantic sympathy, Victorian racial politics, modernist otherness and contemporary forms. The second part poses questions that cut across periods, concerning habitat and extinction, captivity and spectatorship, race and (post-)coloniality, sexuality and gender, religion and law, health and wealth. In doing so, this companion places animals at the centre of literary studies and literature at the heart of urgent debates in the growing field of animal studies.

This book explores representations of animals and animality across the span of literary history, from the Middle Ages to the present.

About the Author
Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Kent. His previous books include Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (2022), Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015), and the co-edited volume Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (2019).


Book Information
ISBN 9781009300049
Author Derek Ryan
Format Paperback
Page Count 300
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 505g