Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethics and the turn to narrative
- 2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the fin-de-siècle
- 3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers
- 4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess
- 5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics
- 6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Ethics and the turn to narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethics and the turn to narrative
- 2 Victorian history and ethics: anxiety about agency at the fin-de-siècle
- 3 Emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers
- 4 When hope unblooms: chance and moral luck in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess
- 5 Oscar Wilde and Henry James: aestheticizing ethics
- 6 Promises, lies, and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Can the reality of complex moral situations be represented by means other than those of imaginative literature?
Bernard WilliamsThe dilemma cuts two ways. On the one hand, how much of what is genuinely important to people can be rendered in universal theories? On the other hand, are stories valuable for ethics, if no moral is attached?
Tobin SiebersI began planning this project in the late 1980s, during the heyday of critical theory when interdisciplinary studies of literature had become common and literary critics were writing from theoretical vantage points developed through work in other fields, especially history and philosophy. Given my interest in the ethics of fiction, I noticed that the seemingly natural combination of moral philosophy and literature was virtually non-existent in literary criticism, despite all the attention to other branches of philosophy. Why? In an essay published in The Future of Literary Theory (1989), Martha Nussbaum concedes that to answer this question fully would be a long story, which “would include the influence of Kant's aesthetics; of early twentieth-century formalism; of the New Criticism. It would include several prevailing trends in ethical theory as well – above all that of Kantianism and of Utilitarianism, ethical views that in their different ways were so inhospitable to any possible relation with imaginative literature that dialogue was cut off from the side of ethics as well.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914 , pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001