It’s no secret that animals are considered objects in the fields of law, commerce, and science, characterized as property and commodities. Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story challenges this ascription and establishes that animals are living subjects, who have minds and opinions of their own and care about what happens to them. Donovan contends that animals’ voices or standpoints should be part of any human decisions concerning their ethical treatment. Elaborating on femin...

Eschewing anthropocentric framings, Radical Natural Law proposes a reconception of natural law that locates it in the critical standpoints of animals and other life forms in the natural world.Engaging an impressively diverse range of thinkers and intellectual traditions, from conceptions of natural law in ancient Stoic and scholastic writings, to theoretical discussions about natural-world critical subjectivity in modern schools of thought, this book is an...

A continuation of Josephine Donovan's exploration of American women's literary traditions, begun with New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, which treats the nineteenth-century realists, this work analyzes the writing of major women writers of the early twentieth century—Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow.The author sees the Demeter-Persephone myth as central to these writers' thematics, but interprets the myth in terms of the historical trans...

This first major study of feminist theory, revised and updated here inits fourth edition, now takes the reader into the twenty-first century.It addresses the basic question, "What is feminism?'' by outlining thevarious strands of feminist theory: liberal, cultural, Marxist-socialist,Freudian, and radical. This fourth edition brings the discussion up-to-date,integrating the developments in feminist theory that have emerged in thelast two decades, su...

In this important new book from a distinguished scholar, Josephine Donovan develops a new aesthetics of care, which she establishes as the basis for a critical approach to the representation of animals in literature.The Aesthetics of Care begins with a guide to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, leading to a reconceptualization of key literary critical terms such as mimesis and catharsis, before moving on to an applied section, with interpret...

Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to approach our relationship with other animals from the critical or "left" tradition in political and social thought. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of "animal rights," the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order. The contributions highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of social po...

Animals and Women is a collection of pioneering essays that explores the theoretical connections between feminism and animal defense. Offering a feminist perspective on the status of animals, this unique volume argues persuasively that both the social construction and oppressions of women are inextricably connected to the ways in which we comprehend and abuse other species. Furthermore, it demonstrates that such a focus does not distract from the struggle for women’s rights, but r...

The first major book of feminist critical theory published in the United States is now available in an expanded second edition. This widely cited pioneering work presents a new introduction by the editor and a new bibliography of feminist critical theory from the last decade. This book has become indispensable to an understanding of feminist theory. Contributors include Cheri Register, Dorin Schumacher, Marcia Holly, Barbara Currier Bell, Carol Ohmann, Carolyn Heilbrun, Catherine Stimpson,...