Engaging violence : civility and the reach of literature / David Simpson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Simpson, David, 1951- author.

Series:

Cultural memory in the present.

Cultural memory in the present

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Courtesy in literature.

Criticism.

Literature and morals.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Summary:

Recent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or accompanies civility and engenders tolerance, civility has also been understood as violence in disguise, and literature, which has only rarely sought to claim the power of violence, has often been accused of inciting it. This book sets out to describe the ways in which these words—violence, literature and civility—and the concepts they evoke are mutually entangled, and the uses to which these entanglements have been put. Simpson's argument follows a broadly historical trajectory through the long modern period from the Renaissance to the present, drawing on the work of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and philosophers. The result is a distinctly new argument about the complex and often mystified entanglements between literature, civility and violence in the anglophone Atlantic sphere. What now are our expectations of civility and literature, separately and together? How do these long-familiar but residually imprecise concepts stand up to the demands of the modern world? Simpson's argument is that, despite and perhaps because of their imperfect conceptualization, both persist as important protocols for the critique of violence.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Civility and Literature and Their Discontents

2. Civil Beginnings

3. Philosophy Polite and Politic: Shaftesbury’s “Inmate Controller”

4. The Displacement of Civility: Violence in a Widening World

5. Civility after 1989: Romancing Small Groups

6. The Reach of Literature

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

ISBN:

9781503633094

1503633098

OCLC:

1345584540