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.
This volume makes a substantial contribution to several disciplines-literary studies, feminist studies, environmental studies, and philosophy as well as animal studies. Donovan (emer., English, Univ. of Maine) has written or edited some dozen previous works, including the acclaimed Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions (CH, Apr'86). Building on foundation laid in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, which she coedited with Carol Adams (2007), Donovan takes issue with the ways in which the philosophies of Descartes and Kant have influenced aesthetic theory since the Enlightenment and offers instead a distinctly feminine aesthetics of care focused on nonhuman animals but with far-reaching implications for human interactions with the environment as well. Donovan engages with a range of complex philosophical issues and writes about them with spirit, precision, and astonishing clarity, making her work accessible to a wide interdisciplinary audience. Literary scholars will find that her analysis is enhanced by examples from an array of authors whose works exemplify an "aesthetics of care" tradition, including Sophocles, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Cather, and Woolf. This extraordinary book, written by a mature master teacher, is a remarkable achievement. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.
