Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader

About the Book

Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader brings together the work of contemporary scholars, teachers, and writers into lively discussion on the moral role of literature and the relationship between aesthetics, art, and ethics. Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives_from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon_contribute to literary criticism? What do we mean when we talk about ethical criticism and how does this differ from the common notion of censorship? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions including: literary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections among literature, religion and philosophy.

Table of Contents:

Part 1 Foreword
Part 2 Preface
Part 3 Ethical Criticism and Literary Theory
Chapter 4 Premises on Art and Morality
Chapter 5 The Moral Connections of Literary Texts
Chapter 6 Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple
Chapter 7 Ethical Criticism: What It Is and Why It Matters
Chapter 8 Against Ethical Criticism
Chapter 9 Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism?
Chapter 10 The Absence of the Ethical: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory
Chapter 11 Evaluative Discourse: A New Turn Towards the Ethical
Chapter 12 The Moral and the Aesthetical: Literary Study and the Social Order
Part 13 Philosophy Religion, and Literature
Chapter 14 Reading for Life
Chapter 15 The "Ancient Quarrel": Literature and Moral Philosophy
Chapter 16 Stories and Morals
Chapter 17 The Absence of Stories: Filling the Void in Ethics
Chapter 18 Literature and the Catholic Perspective
Chapter 19 Literature and Protestantism
Chapter 20 Something to Measure By: Quaker Values in Literature
Chapter 21 Literary Criticism and Religious Values
Part 22 Writers' Responsibilities
Chapter 23 A Writer's Duty
Chapter 24 The Writer's Moral Sense
Chapter 25 Imaginative Writing and the Jewish Experience
Chapter 26 The Problem of Evil in Fiction
Chapter 27 Poetry, Politics, and Morality
Chapter 28 Art and Ethics?
Chapter 29 What Violence in Literature Must Teach Us
Chapter 30 Ethics and Literature
Part 31 Readers and Ethical Criticism
Chapter 32 The Case Against Huck Finn
Chapter 33 Why We Still Need Huckleberry Finn
Chapter 34 Huckleberry Finn: An Amazing Troubling Book
Chapter 35 The Ethical Dimensions of Richard Wright's Native Son
Chapter 36 Sethe's Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading
Chapter 37 Steinbeck, Johnson, and the Master/Slave Relationship
Chapter 38 Censorship and the Classroom

About the Author :
Stephen K. George is professor of English at Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Review :
Since the time of Plato, our culture has debated whether literature can fairly be judged by ethical standards or whether it is essentially beyond the realm of ethics. This unique collection, which brings together many eloquent voices on opposing sides of the question, offers a wonderful way to gain perspective on the great debate and to introduce it to students. A rapidly growing number of serious and attentive readers are finding rich rewards in exploring the overlap between philosophy and literature, particularly when they scrutinize the commentary that moral discourse and dramatic fiction can offer each other. Editor Stephen George has a keen and informed sense of the issues of overlap, cross-fertilization and mutual criticism between fiction and ethics and, as a result, his Ethics, Literature, and Theory covers the terrain masterfully. Helpful and persuasive essays represent the 'permeable membrane' view of moral philosophy and literature while George also sees to it that the agnostics of the literature and moral philosophy interface are heard from. While Wayne Booth is certainly correct in his assertion that 'ethical criticism can never be simple,' Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader offers, hands down, the most lucid and comprehensive anthology to ethics and literary study in the humanities. Rigorous, illuminating, and endlessly thought-provoking, Ethics, Literature, and Theory affords us with a vital intellectual arena for pondering the ethical questions that impact not only the texts that we read, but our lives as well.