Stewart Cole

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

My book project, The Haunted and the Hunted: Human and Nonhuman Animals in British Literature between the Wars, argues that the First World War had a profound impact on how those who lived in its wake saw themselves in relation to their own status as animals—that is, their animality—and that this impact can be traced through the British literature of the 1920s and 30s. Placing five signal novels of the period within their broad literary and cultural contexts, the book will aim to show how 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. It will then go on to argue that this awareness manifests in interwar literature 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 cultural awareness of 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.