Claire Nettleton is Visiting Assistant Professor of French at Pomona College, USA, and editor of Viral Culture: How CRISPR Gene Editing and the Microbiome Transform Humanity and the Humanities (2020), based on a colloquium she organized, and writer of multiple articles and essays on the intersection of animal studies, the history of science, visual art and avant-garde fiction.

1. Introduction

1.1 The Artist as Anarchist

1.2 Historical Framework

1.3 Theoretical Framework: The Modern Animal-The Nineteenth Century Meets Animal Studies?

1.4 Chapter Summary

2. A Caged Animal: The Avant-garde Artist in Edmond and Jules de Goncourt's Manette Salomon

2.1 Contemporary Views of the Visual, Literary Animal

2.2 The Simian Artist

2.3 The Jardin des Plantes: The Artistic Gateway

2.4 Barbizon: The Peasant Artist

3. Buffon Versus the Beast: Taming the Wild Artist in Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin

3.1 The Bourgeois and the Bull

3.2 Painting with Mud

3.3 The Naturalist Project

Part II: The Decadent Animals of the Third Republic

4. The Decadent Deep Sea: Jules Laforgue's "At the Berlin Aquarium"

4.1 Literary Aquariums

4.2 Through the Eyes of Crustaceans

4.3 Visions of the Orient

5. Said the Spider to the Fly: The Triumph of the Minor in Octave Mirbeau's In the Sky

5.1 The Fly-Poet and the Spider-Artist: Writing and Painting as Animalistic Processes

5.2 Darwin and Decadence: The Splendor of Decay and Horror

5.3 Enter the Void : The Spontaneous Generation of Art

6. Féline-Fatale: The New Woman as Catwoman in Rachilde's L'Animale

6.1 Animale des Lettres

6.2 The Second Species: Felines, Femininity and the Avant-garde

6.3 Feline Frankenstein: Rachilde's Artificial Artist-Animals

6.4 From Balconies to Glass Ceilings: Working Women in Modernity

6.5 Cinematic Cats

6.6 Author Animal

7. Conclusion: Henri Rousseau and Synthetic Naïveté