Introduction: Towards an Animal-Centred Literary History

This chapter introduces the study of animals and human–animal relations relations in literature through an examination of the rich and varied representations of animals and animality in Virginia Woolf’s classic work of literary modernism, To the Lighthouse. Woolf’s many examples illustrate how both the metaphorical and the material can stake out different interpretive positions. Moreover, by navigating between them—attending to the tension, the complex relation, between animals’ lived experiences and their literary representations, between their lives and what their lives are made to signify—we can come, through literature, to encounter animal standpoints and to understand animals’ experiences per se. The chapter then outlines how these approaches gained legitimacy within literary studies, and concludes by accounting for the overall organisation of the handbook, in order to offer guidance for how to approach each of its sections.