The Modernist Dog

Abstract

Abstract: Karalyn Kendall-Morwick's Canis Modernis examines dog stories in Anglo-American modernism. Drawing together animal studies, modernist studies, and posthumanist theory, the book argues for an understanding of the human/dog relationship as a case of (two-way) coevolution, not merely (one-way) domestication. Ranging over an array of literary texts including Jack London's Call of the Wild , Virginia Woolf's Flush , J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip , and Samuel Beckett's Three Novels, Canis Modernis finds a sustained concern with dogs' evolution, from early origins to modern breeding practices, in modernist literature. It also shows how encounters with dogs reshaped modernist understandings of the human and of humanist ethics.