This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study-i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and representation-and as a methodological problem for animal studies, and, indeed, for literary studies more generally. What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might be blind to? How can literary studies resist the tendency to press animals into symbolic service as metaphors and allegories for the human whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal? The volume is divided into three sections: