The introduction contextualises the study of Bloomsbury’s beasts in two ways. First, it reflects on strategies for close reading of literary animals and accounts for the emergence and acceleration of modernist animal studies, a subfield that explores links between modernist literature and animality of various stripes; it explains, too, how Bloomsbury can be read as part of modernism’s animal turn while adding an intensified focus on both imaginative transformations and material encounters between human and nonhuman species. Second, in order to show how questions concerning the nonhuman were embedded in the group’s conceptualisation of the human, it provides an overview of how ’beastliness’ (and related terms used in this study) enters the group’s discourse through the different conceptualisations of ‘civilisation’ articulated by its key figures.

The introduction begins by articulating the volume’s two main aims: to offer a rich account of the origins of the new modernist studies (part 1) and to suggest possible new paths of inquiry for the field in the near future (part 2). The introduction then surveys key features of the new modernist studies; examines ongoing debates over what the term “modernism” can encompass; and considers the position of modernist studies vis-à-vis recent critiques of contextualist scholarship. Throughout, it recurs to the strong institutional grounding by which the new modernist studies has been shaped. It also highlights how the collection’s individual chapters speak to the new modernist studies’ intersections with other areas of inquiry; to the continuing importance of examining modernist works in relation to non-, anti-, or not quite modernist ones; and to the value of working close analysis of textual intricacies together with elaboration of historical and cultural contexts.

This chapter explores some of the recent scholarship on Harlem Renaissance women poets to assess whether limiting and gendered critical frameworks of the past are expanding enough to bring them into the fold of Modernist Studies. It curates some of the most significant scholarship to appear since the widespread development of new critical models in Harlem Renaissance and African American feminist literary criticism. It also presents a case study of three poets, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery, whose work models for us the modernism of New Negro women’s lyrical verse, a genre routinely omitted from the modernist canon. It argues that the erotic lyric or erotically charged pastoral verse largely defined for New Negro women poets what it meant to be a modern writer, as well as an artist-activist, and that we should consider the best of such poems part of the modernist canon.

The Coda draws out the book’s main arguments and points out further research avenues opened by its reassessment of aesthetic autonomy both for the study of Stevens and for current debates in new modernist studies. It highlights the relevance of the problem of autonomy to considerations of modernisms’ cultural and spatial expansions worldwide, a development that has come to occupy a center stage in contemporary critical debates in modernist studies. The social and political dimensions of autonomy suggest further lines of inquiry that prove relevant to the new critical and methodological approaches modernist studies have developed in recent decades. The concluding section argues that reexamining the various meanings of modernist autonomy from a culturally and geographically expanded angle might reveal multiple transnational histories of autonomy with a potential to enhance our understanding of global modernisms, including specific reference to Stevens’ poetics.