Nowhere are asymmetrical power dynamics between humans and animals more evident than in systems of captivity. This chapter assesses literary responses to animal capture, with particular emphasis on zoos. It considers the colonial networks of trade that help to populate Western zoos and examines questions of spectatorship and subjectivity behind and in front of the cage. The discussion is structured around a series of vignettes staging different attitudes toward captive animals. These focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s panther, Franz Kafka’s ape Red Peter, Julio Cortázar’s axolotl, Marie NDiaye’s fish-woman, and Lydia Millet’s benighted zoogoer, paying special attention to texts inspired by the Jardin des Plantes in Paris – the world’s oldest civil zoo, which opened during the French revolution.

In an all-too-brief professional career of approximately twenty years, Fitzgerald wrote 178 short stories, most of them for sale to commercial magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty-nine of these stories were collected in four separate volumes, one accompanying each of the four novels that Scribner’s published during Fitzgerald's lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920) was the companion volume for This Side of Paradise (1920); Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) for The Beautiful and Damned (1922); All the Sad Young Men (1926) for The Great Gatsby (1925); and Taps at Reveille (1935) for Tender Is the Night (1934). In addition, he wrote a play, The Vegetable, published by Scribner in 1923, and scores of nonfiction pieces, many of which appeared in commercial magazines during his lifetime. At the time of his death he was working on an elaborately conceived novel, The Last Tycoon, which was published posthumously in 1941 as a fragment with Fitzgerald's own notes. When he was not writing for publication, Fitzgerald wrote about his life and about his observations on life in his ledger and in his notebooks, both of which are now available in book form. In spare moments he wrote letters – letters to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner; letters to his literary agent Harold Ober; letters to literary acquaintances, friends, and family – letters, often about his writing, that now fill four substantial volumes. Above all else, Fitzgerald was a writer, a literary artist, who shared early with Edmund Wilson his immodest goal of becoming “one of the greatest writers who ever lived” (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 70).

This chapter surveys the major scholarly and popular culture responses to the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, to a lesser extent, to Zelda Fitzgerald, between 2000 and 2020. The first part of the chapter discusses the films, TV and radio adaptations, stage and ballet versions, and novels based on Fitzgerald’s works or on the Fitzgeralds’ lives. The second part deals with the book-length scholarship and criticism on Fitzgerald’s life and work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, which has greatly increased and expanded in this period in both subject matter and approach, partially because of the international conferences sponsored by The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, because of the annual issues of The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, which began publication in 2002, and because of the completion, in 2019, of the eighteen-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The material in this second part of the chapter is divided into sections on Bibliographies and Other Reference Works, Editions, Correspondence, Biography, and Criticism, with the latter sub-divided into General Studies – Collections, General Studies – Full-Length Works, and Studies of Individual Works.

Exchanges between Eastern and Western cultures were central to representations of human-animal relations in the eighteenth century. When in 1713 Alexander Pope published an essay against cruelty to animals, he observed how “Everyone knows how remarkable the Turks are for their Humanity in this kind.” This chapter explains how feeling for fellow creatures was coupled in English minds with Eastern – Ottoman and Arab as well as Persian and Indian – compassion for them. Derived from mercantile, scholarly, and scientific exchanges; travelers’ tales; and widely circulating translations of Eastern beast fables, what Srinivas Aravamudan calls “Enlightenment Orientalism” is examined in relation to a contemporary Ottoman representation of animals, the natural history and storytelling of Evliya Çelebi (1611–c. 1687). It also considers such texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Essay on Man, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne. These texts present different versions of multiple species of animal kind as “peoples” in the sense of the Qur’anic verse, explicated by Sarra Tlili, that ‘”there is not an animal in the earth nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like you.”

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.

In the works of controversy that poured from the presses in the century after the Reformation in England, religious opponents regularly called each other by the names of animals. Biblical animals were favored by both puritans and conformists in the early Tudor era, as controversialists sought to claim for their own words the authority of scripture. The metaphoric animals employed by Elizabethan controversialists were more varied, derived from biblical, classical, and some popular sources. By the mid-seventeenth century, the rhetorical animals evoked by religious controversialists were drawn from a wide range of mostly secular sources and were notable for figuring predatory violence, monstrosity, and grotesqueness. Everyday experience of animals was kept strictly separate from the roles that they were assigned in polemical tracts. Arguably, the extreme animalizing of opponents contributed to the failure of negotiation and compromise as civil war approached.

This chapter reads Hamlet in the light of debates in early modern animal studies, arguing that it is a play that responds to contemporary religious and philosophical questions about the distinction between humans and animals in its representation of flesh and of death. In particular, it focuses on ideas about the difference between human and animal death, and sees in Hamlet a challenge to the assumption of human immortality, reading human fleshiness – our edibility – as lying at the core of the play’s contemplations. In what is often regarded as Shakespeare’s key exploration of “the human,” the chapter argues that what can be found is a conception of our species that offers a challenge to the anthropocentrism of the early modern period, but also of our own.

The Cambridge Edition of Tender Is the Night declares that it “chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients.” Likewise, Penguin describes the book as “the account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife’s derangement and [their] lifestyle.” This chapter challenges the androcentric, victim-blaming nature of these long-accepted readings and argues that we have not paid sufficient attention to the sexual violence that permeates Fitzgerald’s novel. More specifically, it explores the conceptual, contextual, and formal ways that the book creates sympathy for Dick Diver, and then it asks readers to consider how our understanding of the text might change if we shift our attention to Nicole, whose adolescent violation is both the inciting event of the novel and occupies its center, literally and figuratively. Taking into consideration Fitzgerald’s literary aspirations alongside the novel’s formal complexity, the chapter argues that Tender Is the Night shares some of the modernist qualities of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries as well as their intensifying anxieties over female sexuality and concludes that by tending to Nicole’s trauma, Tender is as much a novel of recovery and redemption as one of dissipation and decline.

The introduction charts the ways in which literary studies and animal studies have formed a mutually enriching dialogue. Starting with a selection of contemporary short stories, and exploring questions of exploitation, anthropomorphism, and metaphor, it demonstrates how animals alter the way we think about, write, and read literature. The introduction includes a summary of the chapters contained in the book.

This chapter proposes that the representation of animals in contemporary writing is best understood as “literary zoontology”: the portrayal of animal existence, and of sociality among animals and humans, as an intertwined story of the reality of more-than-human life and literary meaning. The framework adopted is principally literary-theoretical. By analyzing some key contemporary critical approaches to making sense of animal life, I argue for attention to the “animal form” of contemporary texts, in which literary animal lives are not dissected into their actual and imaginary, embodied and aesthetic, parts. The analysis then opens onto a key example: George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The animal form of Animal Farm configures together what are normatively understood as essentially different “kinds” of living and being: human and animal, species and individual, speculative and actual, aesthetic and real. Indeed, focusing through the lens of literary zoontology offers us new ways to discover Orwell’s literary animals within the history of human-animal relations. As such, it is one way that literary reading can take us beyond the human-animal divide.

This chapter explores the varied meanings of “youth” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Traditionally, this theme has been examined to the writer’s disadvantage as evidence of his unfortunate investment in adolescence and young adulthood and his dread of senescence, which for him usually set in at the age of thirty. This survey argues that age consciousness was endemic throughout early twentieth-century American culture, with psychologist G. Stanley Hall in particular defining youth as a period of fiery intensity soon lost to the enervating compromises of middle age. Fitzgerald’s literary treatment of this issue helped rewrite the adolescent experience, but his fear of growing old created curious anxieties about sexuality and sex itself, which is why his fiction typically fixates on the kiss instead of coitus.

If relatively modest in quantity, the chamber music of Amy Beach comprises a significant body of work that confronts meaningfully the churning countercurrents of her musical style. Chronologically, this repertoire falls into three groups, of which the first concentrates on works for violin and piano, culminating in the Violin Sonata, while in the second Beach explores a variety of other genres, including the piano quintet. The third and final group adds two late works, for piano trio and wind quintet. If this repertoire betrays clear enough references to Austro-Germanic traditions of chamber music, in particular to the music of Brahms (for example, Beach’s piano quintet exhibits examples of modeling from Brahms’s op. 34), it also reflects Beach’s ongoing efforts to expand the idea of American music, in part in answer to Dvorák’s “challenge” laid down in the “New World” Symphony. For Beach, the diversity of American music encouraged her to incorporate various popular sources, including Irish folk music and native Inuit music, into her own eclectic stylistic mixtures.