Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature

This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.

“Students and teachers engaged in a friendlier, more-than-human reading of texts will surely find The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature a volume of great value.” (Borbála László, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 27 (2), 2021)

Susan McHugh is Professor of English at the University of New England, USA, and author most recently of Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories against Genocide and Extinction (2019).Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. His collaborative books include Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic (2017), Against Value in the Arts and Education (2016), and Killing Animals (2006).John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, and President of ASLE-UKI (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland). He is the author of Empire and the Animal Body (2012), and the co-author of Walrus (2014).McHugh, McKay, and Miller co-edit the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature book series.