Zoological Modernism: Literature, Science, and Animals in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between literature and zoology in early twentieth-century Britain, arguing that modernist literature’s representations of animals drew on and revised zoological understandings of animals and vice versa. Recovering a network of “zoological modernists”—writers, biologists, and filmmakers who knew and read each other—this dissertation reveals the biographical and textual points of intersection between such figures as H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Charles Elton, and the creators of the Secrets of Nature film series. Against the dominant critical understanding of modernism’s animal representations as symbols of human pre-history or the Freudian unconscious, I suggest that at least one strand of modernist writers found real, material animals, the kind studied by zoologists, aesthetically and intellectually compelling. Meanwhile zoologists, challenged by modernism’s destabilization of realism and representation, developed in their texts self-conscious, modernist strategies for writing about animals.