The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature provides the first comprehensive guide to current research in literary animal studies. Mirroring the institutional-structural identity of literary studies more generally, the volume is organized roughly chronologically from Old English, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, Fin-de-siecle, and Modern periods to the present.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Towards an Animal-Centred Literary History - Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller
• Part I. Theoretical Underpinnings
• The Exception and the Norm: Dimensions of Anthropocentrism - Tom Tyler
• Metaphor, Metonymy, More-Than-Anthropocentric. The Animal That Therefore I Read (and Follow) - Ann-Sofie Lönngren
• Narratology Beyond the Human: Self-Narratives and Inter-Species Identities - David Herman
• An(im)alogical Thinking: Contemporary Black Literature and the Dreaded Comparison - Diana Leong
• We Are Not in This World Alone: On Drawing Close, Animal Stories, and a Multispecies Sense of Place - Nandini Thiyagarajan
• Part II. Medieval Literature
• A Community of Exiles: Whale and Human Domains in Old English Poetry - Megan Cavell
• An Ontological Turn for the Medieval Books of Beasts: Environmental Theory from Premodern to Postmodern - Susan Crane
• Chaucer, Lydgate, and the Half-Heard Nightingale - Carolynn Van Dyke
• Huntings of the Hare: The Medieval and Early Modern Poetry of Imperiled Animals - Karl Steel
• Part III. Early Modern Literature
• Human, Animal, and Metamorphic Becomings - Carla Freccero
• Sheep, Beasts, and Knights: Fugitive Alterity in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene Book VI, and The Shepheardes Calender - Rachel Stenner
• My Palfrey, Myself: Toward a Queer Phenomenology of the Horse-Human Bond in Henry V and Beyond - Karen Raber
• What Can Beast Fables Do in Literary Animal Studies? Ben Jonson's Volpone and the Prehumanist Human - Erica Fudge
• Part IV. Literature of the Eighteenth Century
• “Real” Animals and the Eighteenth-Century Literary Imagination - Laura Brown
• Mary Leapor's Creatureliness in “An Essay on Woman” and Other Poems - Anne Milne
• Poetics of the Hunt: Re-reading Agency and Re-thinking Ecology in William Somerville's The Chase - Richard Nash
• Part V. Romantic Literature
• Beyond Symbolism: The Rights and Biopolitics of Romantic Period Animals - Ron Broglio
• Bad Dog: The Dark Side of Misbehaving Animals - Chase Pielak
• Why Animals Matter in Jane Austen - Barbara K. Seeber
• John Keats and the Sound of Autumn: Reading Poetry in a Time of Extinction - Michael Malay
• Cooper's Animal Offences: The Confusion of Species in Last of the Mohicans - Onno Oerlemans
• Part VI. Victorian Literature
• Jane Eyre and Tess Durbeyfield at the Human/Animal Border - Ivan Kreilkamp
• Animals and Nonsense: Edward Lear's Menagerie - Ann C. Colley
• Intimacy, Objectification, and Inter/Intra-Species Relations in Victorian Animal Autobiographies - Monica Flegel
• How Not to Eat: Vegetarian Polemics in Victorian India - Parama Roy
• Part VII. Modernist Literature
• Modernist Animals and Bioaesthetics - Carrie Rohman
• Vivisection in Modernist Culture and Popular Fiction, 1890-1945 - Katherine Ebury
• Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein: Two Modernist Women Writing as Dogs - Marianne DeKoven
• Kingship, Kinship and the King of Beasts in Early Southern African Novels - Jade Munslow Ong
• Animals Inside: Creatureliness in Dezső Kosztolányi's Skylark and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life - Anat Pick
• Part VIII. Contemporary Literature
• Speculative Humanisms: Postwar Universalism and the Question of the Animal - Seán McCorry
• CanLit's Ossiferous Fictions: Animal Bones and Fossils in Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man and Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries - Sarah Bezan
• Returning to the Animals’ Gaze: Reflective Readings of Lionesses Marah and Sekhmet - Wendy Woodward
• “Without the Right Words It's Hard to Retain Clarity”: Speculative Fiction and Animal Narrative - Sherryl Vint
• Jesmyn Ward's Dog Bite: Mississippi Love and Death Stories - Bénédicte Boisseron
• Shared and Hefted Lives in Twenty-First-Century Shepherds’ Calendars - Catherine Parry
• Part IX. New Directions
• The Biopolitics of Animal Love: Two Settler Stories - Nicole Shukin
• Companion Prosthetics: Avatars of Animality and Disability - Michael Lundblad and Jan Grue
• Denizen Habitations: Spaces of Solidarity in Recent South Asian Fiction - Sundhya Walther
• Plagues, Poisons, and Dead Rats: A Multispecies History - Lucinda Cole
• Last Chance to See: Extinction in Literary Animal Studies and the Environmental Humanities - John Miller
• Correction to: Narratology Beyond the Human: Self-Narratives and Inter-Species Identities