Description
Book SynopsisExamines the human-dog relationship in modernist literature, analyzing works by Jack London, Virginia Woolf, Albert Payson Terhune, J. R. Ackerley, Samuel Beckett, and others to show how dogs challenge the autonomy of the human subject and the humanistic underpinnings of traditional literary forms.
Trade Review“A compelling, deeply researched, and valuable study that takes up the question of the canine in modernism, in particular, to explore dogs’ unique proximity to the human species and to describe how the coevolution of humans and dogs should be theorized as providing a special or charged site for examining modernist interspecies contingencies, interactions, and forms of ethical being-with. This notable book continues the exploration of modernism’s significance for discussions of animals and animality in literature.”
—Carrie Rohman,author of Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance
“Clearly written and grounded in both literary theory and animal studies, this work makes a substantial contribution to the literature of both disciplines.”
—R. D. Morrison Choice
“A long-overdue, definitive statement about the importance of dogs in modernist literary fictions by a rising star of a new generation in literary animal studies. Starting from the observation that ‘dogs populate a range of modernist texts yet remain notably absent from critical accounts of the period,’ it fills a tremendous gap in understandings of how and why literary representations both reflect and influence the conceptual crisis of humanism that comes to a head in the twentieth century.”
—Susan McHugh,author of Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction
“[An] engaging monograph that marks out a new territory it calls ‘literary canine studies.’ Reading dog stories (fictional and non-). . . Kendall-Morwick makes a convincing case for dogs’ crucial influence on understandings of human origins, literary character, urban modernity, and the ethics of otherness in Anglo-American modernism.”
—Caroline Hovanec Journal of Modern Literature
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: Modernism and the Canine Condition
1. Canine Origins: Jack London and Konrad Lorenz
2. Mongrelizing Form: Virginia Woolf’s Flush
3. The New Dog: Albert Payson Terhune and J. R. Ackerley
4. Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas
Coda: Modernism and Literary Canine Studies
Notes
References
Index
