Animal Illness and the Literary Imagination

This book shows how major literary works from the eighteenthcentury to the present not only reflect but also shape the thoughts and anxieties of people struggling to navigate crises brought about by animal diseases and their accompanying containment strategies. These literary responses to animal illness remind us that audiences not only within but also far beyond veterinary, agricultural, and political spheres have (and have always had) a stake in these discussions. Like the virus that caused COVID-19, animal disease outbreaks have touched all our lives, and learning to recognize older manifestations of this contact in our language and our literatures enriches our understanding of who we are, how we have come to be, and how we want to proceed in our entangled, multi-species environments.