This collection of essays centers on literary representations of meat-eating, bringing aesthetic questions into dialogue with more established research on the ethics and politics of meat. From the decline of traditional animal husbandry to the emergence of intensive agriculture and the biotechnological innovation of in vitro meat, the last hundred years have seen dramatic changes in meat production. Meat consumption has risen substantially, inciting the emergence of new forms of political subjectivity, such as the radical rejection of meat production in veganism. Featuring essays on both canonical and lesser-known authors, Literature and Meat Since 1900 illustrates the ways in which our meat regime is shaped, reproduced and challenged as much by cultural and imaginative factors as by political contestation and moral reasoning.

Seán McCorry is Honorary Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is currently working on his first monograph on technology and species difference in postwar culture. He is co-founder of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre).

John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. His books include Empire and the Animal Body (2012) and (with Louise Miller) Walrus (2014). He is co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, co-director of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre) and Deputy Chair of ASLE-UKI (Association for Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland).

1. Introduction: Meat Critique

Seán McCorry and John Miller 

2. Inside the "Butcher's Shop":  Women's Great War Writing and Surgical Meat

Vicki Tromanhauser,

3. Kafka's Meat: Beautiful Processes and Perfect Victims

Ted Geier

4. Carnophallogocentrism and the Act of Eating Meat in Two Novels by Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Taylor

Adrian Tait

5. "Necessary Murder": Eating Meat against Fascism in Orwell and Auden

Stewart Cole

6. The Literary Invention of in Vitro Meat: Ontology, Nostalgia and Debt in Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants

John Miller 

7. "They'll Be Breeding Us Like Cattle!": Population Ecology and Human Exceptionalism in Soylent Green

Seán McCorry

8. Herring Fisheries, Fish-Eating and Natural History in W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn

Dominic O'Key

9. "A Grain of Brain": Women and Farm Animals in Collections by Ariana Reines and Selima Hill 

10. Narrative Possibilities in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats

Sarika Chandra

11. Crossing the Barriers of Taste: The Alimentary Materialism of Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder

Sarah Bezan 

12. Belonging to this World: On Living Like an Animal in Michel Faber's Under the Skin

Matthew Calarco

13. Dance With Nothing But Heart (2001): Death, the "Animal" and the Queer "Taste" of the Other

Ruth Lipschitz

14. Meanings of Meat in Videogames

Tom Tyler