In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, the industrialized slaughter of animals and the increasing disappearance of animals from the world of humans coincided with a profound literary engagement with the animal that questioned the assumptions of anthropocentric discourse. Rasheed Tazudeen (English) examines this phenomenon in his dissertation, "Animal Metaphor and the Unmaking of the Human: Carroll, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf." Tazudeen analyzes the “human” and the “nonhuman” as products of historical, material, cultural, and linguistic processes subject to change according to the ways they are expressed in literature. He argues that modernist and late-Victorian authors forge a mode of literary language that did not take the human as its index and attended instead to the nonhuman agencies that have shaped the world.