Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature

Argues that the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts was integral to their exploration of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology.

By focusing on animals, this book offers fresh perspectives on canonical figures such as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster alongside original readings of lesser-studied texts by Leonard Woolf and David Garnett. It contains unpublished archival material and is informed by interdisciplinary research in natural history, science and critical theory.Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualisation of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of the human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enriches our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War.