Foxes in Twenty-First Century British Literature: Vulpine Encounters

This book explores the changing representation of foxes in literature in the twenty-first century with a focus on British writing. It redefines the interspecies connection between foxes and humans by exploring how twenty-first-century texts counter the long history, and ongoing violence, of that relationship, whereby humans have usually written about how they shoot, poison, snare and hunt foxes. The recent identification of a 'sixth extinction' driven by human overconsumption that will decimate both rare and common species, necessitates a counterpoint to discourses of annihilation. There has been an upsurge in literary texts featuring animals reflecting an increasingly sympathetic human interest in nature and wildlife in the UK prompted by the environmental crisis and reinforced by the pandemic lockdown. Foxes' proximity to humans, and close interactions with them, make them powerful figures for challenging anthropocentric assumptions about the world through these fiction texts which reimagine the entanglement of foxes and humans. This book argues that the most powerful representations come from speculative elements of metamorphosis and not from more realistic portrayals of human stewardship (or scientific studies) which tend to reinforce the human/other animal divide.