The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies

Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the ’animal turn’ in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience.
This collection of 25 essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the ’vegan turn’ in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies.

Laura Wright is Professor of English Studies, Director of English Graduate Studies and Chair of the Faculty at Western Carolina University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism, and animal studies. Her monographs include Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement (Routledge, 2006 and 2009), Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (U of Georgia P, 2010) and The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (U of Georgia P, 2015). Her edited collections Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism was published in 2019 by the University of Nevada Press and The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies was published in 2021.

Emelia Quinn is Assistant Professor of World Literatures & Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. She is author of Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).