Emelia Quinn is a DPhil candidate and Wolfson Foundation scholar in the Faculty of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, UK. Her thesis establishes a transhistorical and transnational trajectory of literary veganisms, from the early nineteenth century to the present. She has previously published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Society & Animals, with research interests across veganism, animal studies, and queer theory.
Benjamin Westwood is Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford, UK, and is finishing a thesis on animals and the intersections of classification and literary form in Victorian literature. He recently contributed an essay to an edited collection, Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet (2017), and has an essay on "Edward Lear's Dancing Lines" forthcoming in Essays in Criticism.
¿Introduction: Thinking Through Veganism
Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood
Part I Politics
Vegans in the Interregnum: The Cultural Moment
of an Enmeshed Theory
Laura Wright
Part II Visual Culture
Remnants: The Witness and the Animal
Sara Salih
The Vegan Viewer in the Circum-Polar World; Or, J. H.
Wheldon's The Diana and Chase in the Arctic (1857)
Jason Edwards
Trojan Horses
Tom Tyler
Contents
Vegan Cinema
Anat Pick
Part III Literature
Monstrous Vegan Narratives: Margaret Atwood's
Hideous Progeny
Emelia Quinn
On Refusal
Benjamin Westwood
The Unpacking Plant: Gleaning the Lexicons of Lean Culture
Natalie Joelle
Part IV Definitions
Ethical Veganism as Protected Identity: Constructing
a Creed Under Human Rights Law
Allison Covey
A Vegan Form of Life
Robert McKay
Conclusion
Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood
Index
This collection explores what the social and philosophical aspects of veganism offer to critical theory. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars working in animal studies and critical animal studies, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture shows how the experience of being vegan, and the conditions of thought fostered by veganism, pose new questions for work across multiple disciplines. Offering accounts of veganism which move beyond contemporary conceptualizations of it as a faddish dietary preference or set of proscriptions, it explores the messiness and necessary contradictions involved in thinking about or practicing a vegan way of life. By thinking through as well as about veganism, the project establishes the value of a vegan mode of reading, writing, looking, and thinking.