Animal Subjects: Volume 1
Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism

Animal Subjects finds a new understanding of animal life in the literature and science of the early twentieth century.

Caroline Hovanec (Author)

9781108428392, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 September 2018

232 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.47 kg

'… an excellent article exploring the relation between early film culture and nature films … Hovanec's vital work is set to venture further into the murky waters of insect life and ecological collapse.' Patrick Armstrong, The British Society for Literature and Science

Animal Subjects identifies a new understanding of animals in modernist literature and science. Drawing on Darwin's evolutionary theory, British writers and scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to think of animals as subjects dwelling in their own animal worlds. Both science and literature aimed to capture the complexity of animal life, and their shared attention to animals pulled the two disciplines closer together. It led scientists to borrow the literary techniques of fiction and poetry, and writers to borrow the observational methods of zoology. Animal Subjects tracks the coevolution of literature and zoology in works by H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and modern scientists including Julian Huxley, Charles Elton, and J. B. S. Haldane. Examining the rise of ecology, ethology, and animal psychology, this book shows how new, subject-centered approaches to the study of animals transformed literature and science in the modernist period.

Introduction
Animal subjectivity: Darwin, Freud, James
1. H. G. Wells, Charles Elton, and the struggle for existence
2. Aldous Huxley, Eliot Howard, and the observational ethic
3. Romantic ethologies: D. H. Lawrence and Julian Huxley
4. Bloomsbury's comparative psychology: Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, Virginia Woolf
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Zoology & animal sciences [PSV], Life sciences: general issues [PSA], Biology, life sciences [PS], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]