Literary scholars challenge how we read animal meaning in modernist texts
A new study argues that metaphors involving animals in early 20th-century novels don't work as simple stand-ins for human ideas—they create genuine textual spaces where readers encounter otherness on its own terms. This reframing matters for cultural institutions, publishers, and educators rethinking how literature engages with non-human subjects in an era of heightened animal welfare and environmental concerns.
Originaltitel: Metaphor, Animals, Modernism: Specters of Literarity
<p>Metaphor is of vital concern to the discipline of literary studies as well as the field of animal studies. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and Paul Ricœur’s tropology, this book studies the spectrality of metaphor in relation to animal figures in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, H.D.’s Asphodel, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The analyses show that metaphor and animals alike can invite literarity—a textual hospitality toward otherness—into a work. In this, Trejling confronts the notion of metaphor as substitutional—a metaphysical idea prevalent in animal studies and the posthumanities. In challenging this perception, Metaphor, Animals, Modernism demonstrates that the spectrality of metaphor can make literature a site where readers can encounter a creature—not to name, tame, or train it, but to speak to it, and to await its response. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026</p>