Josephine Donovan

Josephine Donovan is an American scholar of comparative literature who is a professor emerita of English in the Department of English at the University of Maine, Orono. Her research and expertise has covered feminist theory, feminist criticism, animal ethics, and both early modern and American literature with a special focus on American writer Sarah Orne Jewett and the local colorists. She recently extended her study of local color literature to the European tradition. Along with Marti Kheel, Carol J. Adams, and others, Donovan introduced ecofeminist care theory, rooted in cultural feminism, to the field of animal ethics. Her published corpus includes ten books, five edited books, over fifty articles, and seven short stories.

Life and career

Donovan was born in Manila in the Philippines in 1941, and was, with her mother, evacuated shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her father, a captain in the US Army, remained; in 1942, he was captured by the Japanese. Donovan subsequently edited and published his memoirs. Majoring in history, she studied at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, graduating, cum laude, in 1962. Subsequently, she worked in journalism, as a clerk on the copy desks at The Washington Post and Time and as a reporter for a small New York newspaper. Concurrent with her work, she studied creative writing at Columbia University. She went on to study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, reading for an MA and a PhD, both in comparative literature. She subsequently held positions at the University of Kentucky, the University of New Hampshire, as well as working as a copy editor for G. K. Hall & Co. She took early retirement from her position of professor of English at the University of Maine to allow more time for both research and writing, and is currently a professor emerita.

Sarah Orne Jewett. New York: Ungar Publishing Company|Ungar], 1980.
New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition. New York: Ungar, 1983.
Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions. New York: Ungar, 1985.
After the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather and Glasgow. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.
Gnosticism in Modern Literature: A Study of Selected Works of Camus, Sartre, Hesse, and Kafka. New York: Garland, 1990.
Uncle Tom's Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champêtres. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
The Aesthetics of Care. On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York, London, Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2016.
The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America. Amherst/Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020.
Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story. Michigan State University Press, 2022.

Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975.
Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995..
Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals. New York: Continuum, 1996..
P. O. W. in the Pacific: Memoirs of an American Doctor in World War II. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1998..
The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007..