This dissertation examines how animality is implicated in the making of affect in the literary modern period. Looking to the theories of Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Silvan Tomkins, I consider how these thinkers set boundaries between human and animal capacities for feeling. I then attend to how modernist authors respond to these protocols. Chapters one through three read interspecies affect in the narratives of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, showing how they attempt to revise modern expectations of how animals can move people. The final chapter looks to how animals inform Djuna Barnes’ impersonal affect theory. This paper broadens our understandings of modernist affect, arguing that we cannot grasp the full spectrum of feelings in modernity without attending to animality. It is further significant because it gives careful attention to animal experiences in the literature, attempting to read them alongside anecdotal and scientific speculations about the emotional habits, perceptual abilities and social lives of animals. This approach fills a gap in current scholarship that interrogates modern constructions of animality but fails to explore how these fantastic attachments impact the lives of animals.
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