Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory

Edited by Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad

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Paper, 240 pages, 1 table
ISBN: 978-0-231-15283-9
$27.50 / £19.00

December, 2011
Cloth, 240 pages, 1 table
ISBN: 978-0-231-15282-2
$84.50 / £58.50

Why has the academy struggled to link advocacy for animals to advocacy for various human groups? Within cultural studies, in which advocacy can take the form of a theoretical intervention, scholars have resisted arguments that add “species” to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other human-identity categories as a site for critical analysis.

Species Matters considers whether cultural studies should pay more attention to animal advocacy and whether, in turn, animal studies should pay more attention to questions raised by cultural theory. The contributors to this volume explore these issues particularly in relation to the “humane” treatment of animals and various human groups and the implications, both theoretical and practical, of blurring the distinction between “the human” and “the animal.” They address important questions raised by the history of representing humans as the only animal capable of acting humanely and provide a framework for reconsidering the nature of humane discourse, whether in theory, literary and cultural texts, or current advocacy movements outside of the academy.

Related Subjects

• Animal Studies

About the Author

Marianne DeKoven is professor of English at Rutgers University and a recipient of both Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. Her books include Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern, which won the Perkins Award from the Society of Narrative Literature; Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism; and A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing. She is also the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Stein’s Three Lives.

Michael Lundblad is assistant professor of English and director of animality studies at Colorado State University. His research focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture, cultural studies, ecocriticism, and animal and animality studies. His work has appeared in American Literature, PMLA, American Quarterly, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

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