This collection of essays centers on literary representations of meat-eating, bringing aesthetic questions into dialogue with more established research on the ethics and politics of meat. From the decline of traditional animal husbandry to the emergence of intensive agriculture and the biotechnological innovation of in vitro meat, the last hundred years have seen dramatic changes in meat production. Meat consumption has risen substantially, inciting the emergence of new forms of political subjectivity, such as the radical rejection of meat production in veganism. Featuring essays on both canonical and lesser-known authors, Literature and Meat Since 1900 illustrates the ways in which our meat regime is shaped, reproduced and challenged as much by cultural and imaginative factors as by political contestation and moral reasoning.
Author(s): Seán McCorry, John Miller
Series: Palgrave Studies In Animals And Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 259
Tags: Twentieth-Century Literature, Animals, Meat, Literature
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction: Meat Critique (Seán McCorry, John Miller)....Pages 1-17
Inside the “Butcher’s Shop”: Women’s Great War Writing and Surgical Meat (Vicki Tromanhauser)....Pages 19-33
Kafka’s Meat: Beautiful Processes and Perfect Victims (Ted Geier)....Pages 35-52
Carnophallogocentrism and the Act of Eating Meat in Two Novels by Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Taylor (Adrian Tait)....Pages 53-69
“Necessary Murder”: Eating Meat Against Fascism in Orwell and Auden (Stewart Cole)....Pages 71-89
The Literary Invention of In Vitro Meat: Ontology, Nostalgia and Debt in Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (John Miller)....Pages 91-110
“They’ll Be Breeding Us Like Cattle!”: Population Ecology and Human Exceptionalism in Soylent Green (Seán McCorry)....Pages 111-123
Herring Fisheries, Fish-Eating and Natural History in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (Dominic O’Key)....Pages 125-142
“A Grain of Brain”: Women and Farm Animals in Collections by Ariana Reines and Selima Hill (Rachael Allen)....Pages 143-159
Narrative Possibilities in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (Sarika Chandra)....Pages 161-177
Crossing the Barriers of Taste: The Alimentary Materialism of Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder (Sarah Bezan)....Pages 179-195
Belonging to This World: On Living Like an Animal in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (Matthew Calarco)....Pages 197-211
Dance with Nothing but Heart (2001): Death, the ‘Animal’ and the Queer ‘Taste’ of the Other (Ruth Lipschitz)....Pages 213-230
Meanings of Meat in Videogames (Tom Tyler)....Pages 231-247
Back Matter ....Pages 249-257
