The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies - (Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities) by Laura Wright & Emelia Quinn

About the Book

Provides a scholarly overview of the field of vegan literary studies, traversing the relationship between literature and veganism across a range of periods, cultures, and genres.

Book Synopsis

Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the 'animal turn' in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience.
This collection of 25 essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies.

From the Back Cover

Provides a scholarly overview of the field of vegan literary studies, traversing the relationship between literature and veganism across a range of periods, cultures, and genres. Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the 'animal turn' in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience. This collection of twenty-five essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies. Emelia Quinn is Assistant Professor of World Literatures & Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. She is author of Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (2021) and co-editor of Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (2018). Laura Wright is Professor of English Studies, Director of English Graduate Studies, and Chair of the Faculty at Western Carolina University. Her monographs include Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (2006 and 2009), Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (2010), and The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (2015). Her edited collection Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism was published in 2019 and The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies was published in 2021.

Review Quotes

Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn have held their contributors to very high standards of scholarship, theoretical rigour and composition: each chapter in this volume is as lucid, informative and sophisticated as the one before. Taken as a whole, the book combines prodigious scope with granular attention to detail. Readers who want a history of vegan literary studies, or a survey of the field's theoretical repertoire, will find in these pages everything they need. But so too will those interested in particular authors and works, or those with specific questions about how vegan critical practice might enrich close analysis of a scene from narrative fiction, a frame from a graphic novel, a passage in a tract, or a line of poetry.--Philip Armstrong, University of Canterbury

About the Author

Laura Wright is Professor of English Studies, Director of English Graduate Studies and Chair of the Faculty at Western Carolina University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism, and animal studies. Her monographs include Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Routledge, 2006 and 2009), Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (U of Georgia P, 2010) and The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (U of Georgia P, 2015). Her edited collections Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism was published in 2019 by the University of Nevada Press and The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies was published in 2021.

Emelia Quinn is Assistant Professor of World Literatures & Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. She is author of Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).