The Haunted and the Hunted: Human and Nonhuman Animals in British Literature between the Wars

This event has passed.


This is a head-and-torso shot of a man with brown hair standing outside with trees behind him.

Photograph courtesy of Stewart Cole.

Stewart Cole Universities of Wisconsin Fellow (2025–2026)

Professor, Environmental Studies Program and Department of English, UW–Oshkosh

The Haunted and the Hunted: Human and Nonhuman Animals in British Literature between the Wars The Haunted and the Hunted: Human and Nonhuman Animals in British Literature between the Wars argues that a key way in which the trauma of the First World War registers in British culture is through an increased awareness of human beings’ animality and therefore our vulnerability and mortality. Reading five signal novels of the interwar period within their broad literary and cultural contexts, the project demonstrates how this awareness manifests in both an unprecedented profusion of empathetic attempts to portray animals in narrative as conscious, emotional beings worthy of our moral regard and, eventually, an equally marked profusion of cautionary narratives warning that our biological status as animals leaves us open to new forms of oppression in an increasingly technologized mass culture. Most broadly, The Haunted and the Hunted seeks to illuminate how the increased attunement to human animality as registered in interwar literature produced ways of representing our relationship to the nonhuman world that we can and must still learn from today—for if we regard ourselves as superior and unaccountable to the myriad other beings who coexist with us on this planet, we can never inhabit the degree of ecological consciousness necessary to address the crises of planetary health we face, from climate change to biodiversity loss to the mass displacement of human and nonhuman populations.
Stewart Cole is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He is an ecocritically oriented literary scholar whose research focuses on representations of nonhuman animals and human animality as well as (and often in relation to) visions of utopia/dystopia in modern British and Irish literatures. His book The Poetics of Utopia: Shadows of Futurity in Yeats and Auden was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Elements of the book project he is working on at the IRH have appeared or are forthcoming in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Literature Interpretation Theory, Studies in the Novel, English Literary History, and The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies. He is also a poet; his most recent collection is Soft Power (Goose Lane Editions, 2019).
*Events currently open only to 2025-26 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*