The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

During the peak of his contemporary popularity, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived abroad – mostly in France – for five years and eight months, much of that time pursuing a frenzied social life that impeded his literary work. His European travels included lengthy stays from May 1924 through the end of 1926 and then from March 1929 through September 1931, as well as a five-month sojourn in mid-1928. On foreign shores he experienced misery and elation: his wife Zelda's romance with French aviator Edouard Jozan; completion, publication, and celebration of his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925); new friendships with Ernest Hemingway and with Gerald and Sara Murphy; innumerable alcoholic binges and embarrassments; false starts on a fourth novel and increasing self-doubts; domestic rivalry and acrimony; Zelda's first nervous breakdown and treatment; his hotel life and fugitive magazine fiction. Only after returning to the United States did Fitzgerald publish Tender Is the Night (1934), a work that despite its flaws plumbs the paradoxes of desire more profoundly than did Gatsby. Understandably, Tender has preoccupied scholars and biographers seeking insight into the author's life abroad, for its thinly veiled treatment of the Fitzgeralds' domestic calamities, set against the crazy violence of postwar Europe, reveals much about the author's own identification with expatriate culture. But the many short stories set at least partly in Europe likewise merit closer attention, less for their biographical connections than for their representations of the American migration to Europe after World War I.

This chapter argues that two works of Victorian children’s literature – Alfred Elwes’s The Adventures of a Bear (1853) and The Adventures of a Dog (1854) – capture the complex politics of selfhood in relation to animality and law. They also demonstrate the trope of transformation from animal to human: the dog becomes a trusted policeman (or equivalent) and the bear ends up a blind beggar. In both cases, the choice of animals as protagonists allows for a frank discussion of violence, gender, and class conflict.

This chapter reconsiders the significance of The Beautiful and Damned (1922) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s development as a writer and his place in American modernist literature. This second novel occupies a minor position in the Fitzgerald canon and is often regarded as a move away from his experimentations with romanticism, aestheticism, and decadence to naturalism. By contrast, this chapter argues that the novel remains committed to fin-de-siècle theories of aesthetic hedonism propounded by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde in formal, thematic, and intellectual terms and brings them into productive tension with naturalism. The Beautiful and Damned is informed by Paterean theories of perception and hedonism in its preoccupation with the brevity of life, the fragility of beauty, and the necessity of cultivating a heightened mode of perception and consciousness. Naturalism, meanwhile, is deployed strategically as in the narrative to expose the naïve and illusory nature of the aesthetic hedonism of its protagonists. This chapter further argues that Fitzgerald’s reliance on fin-de-siècle tropes should not be understood as anomalous or derivative but, rather, that it situates The Beautiful and Damned in a broader “new decadent” literary movement within American modernism.

This chapter addresses a topic – health – that has come to light in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bringing together animal studies and the medical humanities, the chapter examines key texts from Leo Africanus, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, and others to trace close historical and discursive relationships between human and animal health. Focusing largely on diseases thought to be what we would now call zoonotic, or transferable from nonhuman animals to humans, the chapter seeks to make apparent the significance of cross-species infections that, before antibiotics and most vaccines, helped shape literature, trade, health, and imperial order. Although rabies provided the most recognizable model of cross-species infection, the chapter begins with locust swarms, which offered many Christian writers a model for articulating global connections between pests and pestilence, then turns to shipboard rats, which, even before germ theory, were thought by many early moderns to function as harbingers of death and disease. Having demonstrated how deeply cross-species contagion was entangled with theological definitions about what it is be human, the chapter ends by exploring a little known topic – early modern and eighteenth-century cattle plague – and its implications for reimagining a multispecies medical posthumanities.

“Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art”: This maxim from Fitzgerald’s notebooks squares with his ambition to be among the greatest American writers of his time. Fitzgerald’s evolving sense of who his era’s giant writers were – through the judgments of what he called “the cultural world” – led him by the time he wrote The Great Gatsby and just after to align his work with an elite, international modernism. But as this chapter demonstrates, Fitzgerald’s fiction remained relatively conventional in the context of revolutionary modernism, in good part because of his care for ordinary readers. And the high regard he professed for writers like Joyce, Stein, and Conrad did not preclude his generous interest in more ordinary contemporaries. His wide, eclectic reading of his contemporaries reveals the actual catholicity and conventionality of his literary tastes. The argument suggests that while Fitzgerald’s reputation was bolstered by his positioning himself on the side of the anti-commercial and avant-garde values of the modernist literary field, it was his professional commitment to good, affective writing that proved most crucial to his winning what he most coveted: literary immortality.

Romantic-era writing affirms the ideal of a bond between human and animal, while often showing this bond destroyed by the killing of the nonhuman animal. This chapter explores the treatment of such bonds, and their destruction, in the light of Mark Payne’s argument that literary representations of dying animals incorporate a sacrificial logic by which the nonhuman animal’s death enables the development of the fully human subject and the expression of that humanity in writing. In Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, William Wordsworth’s Hart-Leap Well, Lord Byron’s Mazeppa, and William Blake’s "The Fly," I argue that elements of this "humanizing" process can be traced, but that the poems are characterized by ambivalence: too troubled by animal death, too uncertain about the efficacy of the message they attempt to draw from it, or in the case of “The Fly,” too wedded to the radical equivalence of all beings to be fully committed to a story of progress through sacrifice. The chapter ends with a discussion of John Clare’s badger poems and “To the Snipe,” in which there is a radical refusal of sacrificial logic.

In earnest efforts to disrupt the racialized space of Anthropocene conversations, Indigenous epistemological alternatives have emerged as exceptional antidotes to ecological despair with privileged access to nonhuman and interspecies lifeworlds. While many Indigenous approaches do offer beneficent alternatives, their broadscale characterization tends to deposit fresh essentialisms in the wake of the old, and battles over intellectual privacy and appropriation frustrate coalitional urgency. Thus, the very incommensurability that these new approaches seek to demolish – those nourished by the imperial practices we aim to counter – are rejuvenated. Simultaneously, Indigenous critical thought continues to herald its singular capacities for reclamation, and at the same time to police its appropriation, at once demanding and rejecting inclusion in serious academic and scientific conversations. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of the “weird” as a way of conceptualizing human embeddedness in a vast biosphere of nonhuman others that both contains and erases us, this chapter argues that a politics of action based on exceptional epistemologies and myths of alterity cannot succeed. We are tangled in a structural universe where fictions of difference – not just between humans and nonhumans, but among humans themselves – emerge from the very systems we seek to explode.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald offers both new and familiar readers an authoritative guide to the full scope of Fitzgerald’s literary legacy. Gathering the critical insights of leading Fitzgerald specialists, it includes newly commissioned essays on The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald’s judgment of his peers, and Fitzgerald’s screenwriting and Hollywood years, alongside updated and revised versions of four of the best essays from the first edition on such topics as youth, maturity, and sexuality; the short stories and autobiographical essays; and Americans in Europe. It also includes an essay on Fitzgerald’s critical and cultural reputation in the first decades of the twenty-first century and an up-to-date bibliography of the best Fitzgerald scholarship and criticism for further reading.

F. Scott Fitzgerald will be remembered primarily for his novels and stories, but during his twenty years as a professional writer, he also produced an important and revealing body of work in the form of articles, essays, and correspondence. The very best of these – the autobiographical pieces written in the 1930s – command the lyrical magic and emotional power of his most lasting fiction. And even at their least meritorious, in the advertisements for himself that Fitzgerald composed as a beginning author, these articles reveal a great deal about the way he wanted to present himself to his readers. Read chronologically, they trace the rise and fall of his career from the publication of This Side of Paradise in March 1920 to his final years in Hollywood. In accepting This Side of Paradise for publication, Editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner asked Fitzgerald for a photograph and some publicity material. “You have been in the advertising game long enough to know the sort of thing,” Perkins added (Dear Scott/Dear Max, 21). In fact, Fitzgerald had worked only four months for the Barron Collier agency in New York, from March to July 1919, but he did understand how promotion could help sell books and was eager to cooperate in the enterprise. In a letter presented at the American Booksellers' Convention and included on a leaf added to several hundred copies of the novel, he began to establish a public personality designed at once to shock and attract his audience.

This chapter examines shifting understandings of the relationship between sexuality as a biopolitical phenomenon and literary practice by focusing on two uses of the concept “biocentrism.” By holding in tension Margot Norris’s use of “biocentric” to capture specifically modernist aesthetics, based on affirming rather than negating the animality of the human, and Sylvia Wynter’s argument that the post-Darwinian, globally colonialist conception of the human is “biocentric,” the chapter examines how the very concepts of “human,” “animal,” “sexuality,” and “literature” are all products of a colonialist episteme. The final section turns to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which productively stages the confrontation between these two, pressuring literary studies to examine how its attachments to the very concepts of “sexuality” and “animality” reveal the coloniality of the field.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was every 5′3 ½″ a lady, but she outdrank men from Montgomery to Manhattan to Marseilles. Her short stories were so good that, sometimes, they appeared under her husband Scott's name. She was a gifted painter whose work was mostly bought out of pity, lost forever because it was unsigned and often given away, and burned by a protective, possibly jealous sister. She was a gifted dancer who began in earnest too late and never got a real chance. She was an early feminist heroine. She has inspired classic fantasy-action video games, lines of clothing, agenda-driven biographies, and novels from the beautiful to the damnable. She is catnip to movies and television series and is the current subject of two major biopics, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson. The legends of Zelda go on and on, from shortly after her birth in 1900 to the present day, and surely beyond. Yet the truths of Zelda, as we can find them, are much finer and more meaningful than all the legends they still beget. It is time to realize how much they can round out, and also increase, the legend.

This chapter distinguishes two ways in which the Middle Ages conceived the relationship between human and nonhuman creatures. The first, according to which humans are a unique kind of animal (in the Latin word’s sense of “living being”), is available primarily to the learned, whereas the second, widely attested in lay usage and practice, concerns the difference (or lack of it) between humans and “beasts.” The chapter explores the complication of both relationships in the French and English romances of William of Palermo (late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century and mid-fourteenth-century, respectively), in which one aristocratic protagonist is turned into a werewolf and others disguise themselves in the skins of bear or deer. Human exceptionalism appears to condition the story’s coding of social dysfunction as animalization, but the romances equally show medieval aristocratic and chivalric identity embracing its proximity to “beasts,” for example, in the notion of sovereignty, in the symbolic languages of heraldry and dreams, and in moments of explicit self-identification. The chapter concludes by arguing that the way these romances build their fiction with reference to animals is materialized in the manuscript books that transmit them, made up as they are of parchment pages, that is, of processed animal skins.