Thinking Veganism In Literature And Culture

This collection explores what the social and philosophical aspects of veganism offer to critical theory. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars working in animal studies and critical animal studies, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture shows how the experience of being vegan, and the conditions of thought fostered by veganism, pose new questions for work across multiple disciplines. Offering accounts of veganism which move beyond contemporary conceptualizations of it as a faddish dietary preference or set of proscriptions, it explores the messiness and necessary contradictions involved in thinking about or practicing a vegan way of life. By thinking through as well as about veganism, the project establishes the value of a vegan mode of reading, writing, looking, and thinking.

Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present focuses on the iteration of the trope 'the monstrous vegan' across two hundred years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism's relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the 'human, ' the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted. Reading Veganism proposes that we can recognise and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First, monstrous vegans do not eat animals, an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second, they are hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman animal parts, destabilising existing taxonomical classifications. Third, monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction, the product of male acts of creation. And finally, monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principle contention of the book is that understandings of veganism, as identity and practice, are limited without a consideration of multiplicity, provisionality, failure, and insufficiency within vegan definition and lived practice. Veganism's association with positivity, in its drive for health and purity, is countered by a necessary and productive negativity generated by a recognition of the horrors of the modern world. Vegan monsters rehearse the key paradoxes involved in the writing of vegan identity.

Provides a scholarly overview of the field of vegan literary studies, traversing the relationship between literature and veganism across a range of periods, cultures, and genres. Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the 'animal turn' in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience. This collection of twenty-five essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies. Emelia Quinn is Assistant Professor of World Literatures & Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. She is author of Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (2021) and co-editor of Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (2018). Laura Wright is Professor of English Studies, Director of English Graduate Studies, and Chair of the Faculty at Western Carolina University. Her monographs include Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (2006 and 2009), Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment (2010), and The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (2015). Her edited collection Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism was published in 2019 and The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies was published in 2021.

This book examines the ethics, politics and aesthetics of veganism in contemporary culture and thought. Traditionally a lifestyle located on the margins of western culture, veganism has now been propelled into the mainstream, and as agribusiness grows animal issues are inextricably linked to environmental impact as well as to existing ethical concerns. This collection connects veganism to a range of topics including gender, sexuality, race, the law and popular culture. It explores how something as basic as one’s food choices continue to impact on the cultural, political, and philosophical discourse of the modern day, and asks whether the normalization of veganism strengthens or detracts from the radical impetus of its politics. With a Foreword by Melanie Joy and Jens Tuidor, this book analyzes the mounting prevalence of veganism as it appears in different cultural shifts and asks how veganism might be rethought and re-practised in the twenty-first century.

This wide-ranging volume explores the tension between the dietary practice of veganism and the manifestation, construction, and representation of a vegan identity in today’s society. Emerging in the early 21st century, vegan studies is distinct from more familiar conceptions of "animal studies," an umbrella term for a three-pronged field that gained prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, consisting of critical animal studies, human animal studies, and posthumanism. While veganism is a consideration of these modes of inquiry, it is a decidedly different entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience. The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies is the must-have reference for the important topics, problems, and key debates in the subject area and is the first of its kind. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into five parts: History of vegan studies Vegan studies in the disciplines Theoretical intersections Contemporary media entanglements Veganism around the world These sections contextualize veganism beyond its status as a dietary choice, situating veganism within broader social, ethical, legal, theoretical, and artistic discourses. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of vegan studies, animal studies, and environmental ethics.

Most people care about animals, but only a tiny fraction are vegan. The rest often think of veganism as an extreme position. They certainly do not believe that they have a moral obligation to become vegan. Gary L. Francione—the leading and most provocative scholar of animal rights theory and law—demonstrates that veganism is a moral imperative and a matter of justice. He shows that there is a contradiction in thinking that animals matter morally if one is also not vegan, and he explains why this belief should logically lead all who hold it to veganism. Francione dismantles the conventional wisdom that it is acceptable to use and kill animals as long as we do so “humanely.” He argues that if animals matter morally, they must have the right not to be used as property. That means that we cannot eat them, wear them, use them, or otherwise treat them as resources or commodities. Why Veganism Matters presents the case for the personhood of nonhuman animals and for veganism in a clear and accessible way that does not require any philosophical or legal background. This book offers a persuasive and powerful argument for all readers who care about animals but are not sure whether they have a moral obligation to be vegan.

Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to veganism. Her focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body (both male and female) as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies.

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and lesser well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practises. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasises that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.