Animal Rights in The Books Store

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell.

In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.

The book demonstrates that changing relationships with animals can only make sense by relating them to key aspects of social and cultural change. It is not focused on how humans should act towards animals; rather it is concerned with how humans relate to animals and how this has changed and why. Key changes are related to the moral crisis of humanity resulting from a breakdown of the modern world order. Moreover, it highlights, through chapters on companion animals, hunting and fishing, animal leisure's such as bird watching and wildlife parks, meat ad livestock industries, how attitudes and practices towards animals vary widely according to social class, ethnicity, gender, region and nation.

Written in a lively and accessible style, the book will be of interest to upper level undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, history, zoological, biological, life and veterinary studies.