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, Smi 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.