This book explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, demonstrating the value of a literary animals.

ContentsIntroduction Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, Jane Spencer Part I Testing Metaphor1. Entities in the World: Intertextuality in Medieval Bestiaries and FablesCarolynn Van Dyke 2. Una’s ‘Milkewhite Lambe’Karen L. Edwards3. Behn’s Beasts: Aesop’s Fables and Surinam’s Wildlife in OroonokoJane Spencer Part II Plotting Agency4. Shakespeare’s Animal PartsPhilip Armstrong 5. Exit Pursuing a Human: Performing Animals on the Early Modern StageAndy Kesson 6. Collaborative Agency: Animals in Hardy’s Rural NovelsVirginia Richter Part III Inscribing Voice7. Counting Animals: Nonhuman Voices in Lear and CarrollKaori Nagai 8. ‘What am I?’: Locating the Indeterminate Voices of Ted Hughes’s Animal PoemsCarrie Smith 9. "Thou, Spotted Eros": Love Poetry, Taxonomy, and the Erotics of Adamic NamingMatthew Margini Part IV Exploiting Bodies10. The Hunting of the Hare: Female Virtue and Companionate Marriage in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom JonesAdela Ramos 11. "Filth and Fat and Blood and Foam": Animal Capital, Commodified Meat, and the "Human" in Great Expectations Jennifer McDonell 12. Fiction, Fashion, and the Victorian Fur Seal HuntJohn Miller Part V Loving Dogs13. Animal Intimacies: Cross-Species Affect and the Lapdog LyricLaura Brown 14. Anthropomorphism, Personification and Humanization in William Wordsworth’s Dog Poems James P. Carson 15. "Was it Flush, or was it Pan?": Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Canine BiographyDerek Ryan