Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier. By Naama Harel. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020. 216 pages + 1 image. $59.95 hardcover, open access eBook.

Abstract

is to demonstrate the constructed nature of scientific narratives, including Koch’s Ätiologie der Tuberkulose [1884]. With her focus on origin stories and the beginnings of the detective story in the nineteenth century, Seidel’s prose is stylistically in keeping with the sweeping narratives of the period under consideration. Her writing is engaging, and the author excels at providing detailed analyses of countless intersections between literature and science that are consistently well researched and argued. Nevertheless, the work would have benefited from more embedded synthesis and signposting, where the larger implications of Seidel’s findings for the detective-story genre or individual scientific disciplines emerged more prominently. On more than one occasion, this reviewer stumbled over what seemed to be abrupt shifts in focus, when the author—without providing an explicit synthesis of preceding material or a rationale for subsequent content—moved to an excursus, a new text, or a new section. To be sure, each subsection of the case studies indicates a theme (with respect to evolutionary biology, “Missing Links”), yet the ultimate organizing principle in this section is a close reading of individual works to highlight the existence of common discourses across science and literature. In her conclusion, Seidel touches on the rationale for the selection of works included in her study (439); a brief treatment of these criteria would have been a welcome addition to the disciplinary subsections, as would a consideration of the patterns or development that the works present within a given subsection. Alternately, a more explicitly thematic organization in the third section might have facilitated subsequent reference to Seidel’s analyses. These points do not significantly impinge on the manifold contributions to intellectual and cultural history of the long nineteenth century of Seidel’s study. Her close readings of detective stories, among them Perutz’s and Huch’s texts, are in and of themselves meaningful contributions to the discipline. Yet more significantly, the author successfully weaves crime and detective fiction into the intellectual fabric of the nineteenth century, offers an innovative and productive definition of the subgenre of the detective story, and illuminates the constructed nature of scientific writings. As such, Dem Anfang auf der Spur promises to be of interest to scholars in interdisciplinary fields, including comparative literature, narrative theory, and literature and science studies.