The ethics in literature / edited by Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, and Tim Woods.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Rainsford, Dominic, 1965-

Hadfield, Andrew.

Woods, Tim.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Didactic literature, English--History and criticism.

Didactic literature, English.

Didactic literature, American--History and criticism.

Didactic literature, American.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Ethics in literature.

Physical Description:

xi, 281 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Summary:

This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts, offering an exemplary display of these new critical habits at work. Each essay combines close reading of literary texts with reference to current theoretical debates, and each in its own way addresses the question of the ethical significance of literature as a vocation or as social institution -- whether it be from the point of view of the author, the professional critic, the general reader, or the nation-state.

Contents:

Introduction: Literature and the Return to Ethics / Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods 1

Part I Self and History 15

1 Ethics, Autobiography and the Will: Stephen Spender's World Within World / Richard Freadman 17

2 'Ethics cannot afford to be nation-blind': Saul Bellow and the Problem of the Victim / Andrew Hadfield 38

3 Have You Reread Levinas Lately? Transformations of the Face in Post-Holocaust Fiction / Norman Ravvin 52

Part II Agency and Responsibility 71

4 The Unbearable Lightness of Acts / Valeria Wagner 73

5 Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad's The Secret Agent / Ruth Kolani 86

6 John Cheever's The Swimmer and the Abstract Standpoint of Kantian Moral Philosophy / Rebecca Hughes, Kieron O'Hara 101

Part III Literature, Interpretation and Ethics 117

7 Understanding and Ethics in Coleridge: Description, Evaluation and Otherness / David P. Haney 119

8 Derrida, Rushdie and the Ethics of Mortality / Chris McNab 136

9 'Role Models', Conversation and the Ethical Drive / Ian MacKillop 152

Part IV Sympathy for the Other 167

10 Feminist Ethical Reading Strategies in Michele Roberts's In the Red Kitchen: Hysterical Reading and Making Theory Hysterical / Susan Rowland 169

11 Sensibility and Suffering in Rhys and Nin / Andrew Gibson 184

12 Moral Capacities and Other Constraints / Cristina Mejia 212

Part V Public Morality 229

13 'Sweet Dreams, Monstered Nothings': Catachresis in Kant and Coriolanus / Ortwin de Graef 231

14 Literature and Existentialist Ethics in Simone de Beauvoir's 'Moral Period' / Terry Keefe 248

15 Sympathy and Science in Frankenstein / Janis McLarren Caldwell 262.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

031221653X

OCLC:

39130405