The Ethics in Literature [Hardcover]

The question of ethics has dominated recent developments within the humanities. This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts. Ethical and literary issues explored by the contributors include biography, sensibility, national identity, feminism, postcolonialism, religion, subjectivity and stylistics. Literary authors and philosophers/theorists discussed range from Shakespeare and Mary Shelley to Michele Roberts and Salman Rushdie, and from Kant and Coleridge to Derrida and Levinas.Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Literature and the Return to Ethics; A.Hadfield, D.Rainsford and T.Woods SECTION I: SELF AND HISTORY Ethics, Autobiography and the Will: Stephen Spender's 'World Within World'; R.Freadman 'Ethics Cannot Afford to be Nation-Blind': Saul Bellow and the Problem of the Victim; A.Hadfield Have You Reread Levinas Lately? Transformations of the Face in Post-Holocaust Fiction; N.Ravvin SECTION II: AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY The Unbearable Lightness of Acts; V.Wagner Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad's 'The Secret Agent'; R.Kolani John Cheever's 'The Swimmer' and the Abstract Standpoint of Kantian Moral Philosophy; R.Hughes and K.O'Hara SECTION III: LITERATURE, INTERPRETATION AND ETHICS Understanding and Ethics in Coleridge: Description, Evaluation and Otherness; D.Haney Derrida, Rushdie and the Ethics of Mortality; C.McNab 'Role Models', Conversation and the Ethical Drive; I.MacKillop SECTION IV: SYMPATHY FOR THE OTHER Feminist Ethical Reading Strategies in Mich??? Roberts's 'In the Red Kitchen': Hysterical Reading and Making Theory Hysterical; S.Rowland Sensibility and Suffering in Rhys and Nin; A.Gibson Moral Capacities and Other Constraints; C.Mej???SECTION V: PUBLIC MORALITY 'Sweet Dreams, Monstered Nothings': Catachresis in Kant and 'Coriolanus'; O.de Graef Literature and Existentialist Ethics in Simone de Beauvoir's 'Morl“I