This volume explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary texts engage with relationships between humans and other animals. Written by forward-thinking early-career scholars, as well as established experts in the field, the chapters discuss key texts in the emergent canon of animal narratives, including Franz Kafka's animal stories, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi, Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller, and others. The volume is divided into four main sections. Two period-focused sections center on modernism and on late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, while two further sections foreground the more general project of theory building in literary animal studies, examining interconnections among concepts of species, sexuality, gender, and genre. The volume also raises issues that extend beyond the academic community, including ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships and the problems of species loss and diminishing biodiversity.

Introduction: Literature beyond the Human; David HermanPART I: LITERARY MODERNISMS, ANIMAL WORLDS, AND TRANS-SPECIES ENTANGLEMENTS1. Kafka's Animal Stories: Modernist Form and Inter-species Narrative; Marianne DeKoven2. The Tortured Animals of Modernity: Animal Studies and Italian Literature; Damiano Benvegnù3. The Black Sheep: Djuna Barnes's Dark Pastoral; Andrew KalaidjianPART II: LITERATURE BEYOND THE HUMAN I: SPECIES, SEXUALITY, AND GENDER4. "Becoming Men" and Animal Sacrifice: Contemporary Literary Examples; Josephine Donovan5. A Tail for Two Theorists: The Problem of the Female Monster in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love; Rajesh K. Reddy6. Friendship; or, Representing More-than-Human Subjectivities and Spaces in J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip; Shun Yin Kiang PART III: LITERATURE BEYOND THE HUMAN II: HUMAN-ANIMAL INTERACTIONS ACROSS GENRES7. "A Little Wildness": Negotiating Relationships between Human and Nonhuman in Historical Romance; Christy Tidwell8. Animal Worlds and Anthropological Machines in Yann Martel's Millennial Novel Life of Pi; Hilary Thompson9. "Like Words Printed on Skin": Desire, Animal Masks, and Multispecies Relationships in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt; Nandini ThiyagarajanPART IV: HUMAN-ANIMAL ENTANGELEMENTS IN LATE TWENTIETH AND EARLYTWENTY-FIRST FICTION10. Horsescapes: Space, Nation, and Human-Horse Relations in Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven; Jopi Nyman11. Animal Others, Other People: Exploring Cetacean Personhood in Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller; Craig Smith12. Ghostly Presences: Tracing the Animal in Julia Leigh's The Hunter; Roman Bartosch