Animals, Animality, and Literature

Description

Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.

Bruce Boehrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of Renaissance literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. His most recent single-author books include Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge, 2013) and Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in European Literature (2010). From 2000 to 2008 he served as Founding Editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and he is editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007). Molly Hand is Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer in the Department of English at Florida State University. Her scholarly work appears in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme; Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011); and The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (2012). She is currently at work on a book-length study of animal familiars in early modern English literature. Brian Massumi is Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He specializes in the philosophy of experience, art and media theory, and political philosophy. His most recent books include Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (2015), Politics of Affect (2015), and What Animals Teach Us About Politics (2014). He is co-author with Erin Manning of Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (2014). Also with Erin Manning and the SenseLab collective, he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction.

'This is a reference book indispensable to any self-respecting academic library, but it is also a publication that sits well in the personal collection of any student or lay person interested in the discipline.' Janette Leaf, The British Society for Literature and Science