Overview

Why and how do people campaign on behalf of a species that is not their own? Responses to this question provide important insights into the much misunderstood animal rights movement and the people in it who challenge the moral orthodoxy that underpins our attitudes towards nonhuman animals. The norm of moderate concern for animals - that animals matter albeit less than humans - permits the (ab)use of animals in vivisection, factory farming, bloodsports and other contexts where animals suffer. Social movement theory is used to show how animal rights activists are engaged in the social construction of cruelty as a social problem which they seek to prevent by their intellectual, practical and emotion work in seminal campaigns against cruelty in the United States, England and Australia.

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Reviews

'Utopia Ltd. presents us with a new constellation of the field under inquiry, or - as one of Beaumont's masters of thought, Benjamin, would say - with a dialectical image which on the one hand makes some common features of late-nineteenth century utopian literature stand out, and on the other does not neglect the single stars. I recommend it warmly.' Darko Suvin, Emeritus Professor of English and Comparitive Literature, McGill University. 'What I find particularly valuable about this book is the way in which it provides a new framework for understanding well-known texts such as Bellamy's Looking Backward, and especially Morris's News from Nowhere, by situating them in relation to the large output of utopian and cacatopian literature produced in the late nineteenth century. This phenomenon is an ideological episode worthy of attention in its own right, as a symptom of the widely-perceived crisis of bourgeois culture around the fin de siecle, and Beaumont does a convincing job of explaining it, thereby making it interesting to the reader. But I suspect that many on the left will be drawn to this study by the way it helps us towards a fuller understanding of Morris's News from Nowhere and issues around Marxist utopianism.' Andrew Hemingway, Professor of Art History, University College, London.

""'Utopia Ltd. presents us with a new constellation of the field under inquiry, or - as one of Beaumont's masters of thought, Benjamin, would say - with a dialectical image which on the one hand makes some common features of late-nineteenth century utopian literature stand out, and on the other does not neglect the single stars. I recommend it warmly.' Darko Suvin, Emeritus Professor of English and Comparitive Literature, McGill University. 'What I find particularly valuable about this book is the way in which it provides a new framework for understanding well-known texts such as Bellamy's Looking Backward, and especially Morris's News from Nowhere, by situating them in relation to the large output of utopian and ""cacatopian"" literature produced in the late nineteenth century. This phenomenon is an ideological episode worthy of attention in its own right, as a symptom of the widely-perceived crisis of bourgeois culture around the fin de siecle, and Beaumont does a convincing job of explaining it, thereby making it interesting to the reader. But I suspect that many on the left will be drawn to this study by the way it helps us towards a fuller understanding of Morris's News from Nowhere and issues around Marxist utopianism.' Andrew Hemingway, Professor of Art History, University College, London.""

'Only a handful of doctoral dissertations have been produced on the sociology of the animal movement (included Munro's own on which this book is based),...Munro's survey of the sociological literature on animal protection ... is timely, and his description and analysis of the tactics and strategy of the animal movement, contained particularly in chapter 6, is one of the best.' Robert Garner, Society & Animals, 2005 no. 3.

Author Information

Lyle Munro, MA (ANU), Ph.D. (Monash) is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Research at Monash University in Australia. He has published widely on the animal rights movement including Compassionate Beasts: The Quest for Animal Rights (Praeger, Westport, CT. 2001). Matthew Beaumont, D. Phil. (2000) in English Literature at the University of Oxford, has been a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, for the last three years. He has published a number of articles on nineteenth-century literature.

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