Main description:

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.

Contents:

1. Introduction: Meat CritiqueSean McCorry and John Miller
2. Inside the "Butcher's Shop": Women's Great War Writing and Surgical MeatVicki Tromanhauser,
3. Kafka's Meat: Beautiful Processes and Perfect VictimsTed Geier
4. Carnophallogocentrism and the Act of Eating Meat in Two Novels by Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth TaylorAdrian Tait
5. "Necessary Murder": Eating Meat against Fascism in Orwell and AudenStewart Cole
6. The Literary Invention of in Vitro Meat: Ontology, Nostalgia and Debt in Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space MerchantsJohn Miller
7. "They'll Be Breeding Us Like Cattle!": Population Ecology and Human Exceptionalism in Soylent GreenSean McCorry
8. Herring Fisheries, Fish-Eating and Natural History in W. G. Sebald's The Rings of SaturnDominic O'Key
9. "A Grain of Brain": Women and Farm Animals in Collections by Ariana Reines and Selima Hill Rachael Allen
10. Narrative Possibilities in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of MeatsSarika Chandra 11. Crossing the Barriers of Taste: The Alimentary Materialism of Jim Crace's The Devil's LarderSarah Bezan
12. Belonging to this World: On Living Like an Animal in Michel Faber's Under the SkinMatthew Calarco
13. Dance With Nothing But Heart (2001): Death, the "Animal" and the Queer "Taste" of the OtherRuth Lipschitz
14. Meanings of Meat in VideogamesTom Tyler