Authorship, Ethics and the Reader Blake, Dickens, Joyce [Hardcover]

Dominic Rainsford examines ways in which literary texts may seem to comment on their authors' ethical status. Its argument develops through readings of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, three authors who find especially vivid ways of casting doubt on their own moral authority, at the same time as they expose wider social ills. The book combines its interest in ethics with post-structuralist scepticism, and thus develops a type of radical humanism with applications far beyond the three authors immediately discussed.Acknowledgements - Texts and Abbreviations - Introduction - PART 1: BLAKE - Melancholia and the Search for a System - Images of Authorship/Experiments with Ethics - The Analyst and Agent of Wrongs - PART 2: DICKENS - Innocence and Experience, Again - From Wish-Fulfilment to Ascetic Flatness - Unsolved Problems and Deviant Narrators - PART 3: JOYCE - The Ineluctable Modality of the Ethical - Conclusion: Meeting the Author/Facing the Book - Notes - Index

'Rainsford's book is clearly written, often witty, well-informed and frequently incisive in its ethical readings. What is more, its comparative methodology draws intriguing parallels between and among the featured authors without being excessively reductive as it effectively bridges formalism and poststructuralism...Authorship, Ehtics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce does make us all more human and more humane.' - Mark M. Hennelly, Jr, Dickens Quarterly

'This noteworthy recent contribution from a young and able critic displays an infectious courage and confidence in its reading of three such canonical giants as Blake, Joyce and Dickens to see what they have in common and where the comparable intellectual excitements of their works might lead the reader.' - Richard Brown, Irish Studies

DOMINIC RAINSFORD