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

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.

Caroline Hovanec earned her Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, where she won the Edgar Hill Duncan Award for academic achievement. She is Assistant Professor of English and Writing at the University of Tampa; her research interests include modernism, literature and science, environmental humanities, and contemporary literature. She has published essays on aestheticism and science fiction, the melting of glaciers, and the 1918 influenza pandemic. She is member of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) and the Modernist Studies Association (MSA).