The Aesthetics of Care On the Literary Treatment of Animals

by Donovan, Josephine

• ISBN13: 9781501317194
• ISBN10: 1501317199
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-06-02
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

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 interpretations of the specific treatment of animals handled by a wide range of authors, including Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, George Sand, and J.M. Coetzee. The book closes with three concluding theoretical chapters.

Clear, original, and provocative, The Aesthetics of Care introduces and makes new contributions to a number of burgeoning areas of study and debate: aesthetics and ethics, critical theory, animal ethics, and ecofeminist criticism.

Author Biography

Josephine Donovan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Maine, USA. She is the author or editor of 13 books, including Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 (1999), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, After the Fall (1989), and The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (2007, co-edited with Carol J. Adams). Her groundbreaking Feminist Theory (first published, 1985; fourth edition, 2012), which was also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and described "as the classic survey and analysis of the roots and development of feminist theory," has been translated into Chinese, French, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, and Korean.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. The Aesthetics of Modernity
2. Willa Cather's Aesthetic Transitions
3. The Aesthetics of Care
4. Animal Ethics and Literary Criticism
5. Tolstoy's Animals
6. Local-Color Animals
7. Coetzee's Animals
8. Metaphysical Meat
9. The Transgressive Sublime
10. The Aesthetics of Emergence
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index