Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions
Cambridge University Press, 4/3/2017
EAN 9781107185951, ISBN10: 1107185955
Hardcover, 194 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Recently there has been a renewed interest in the ethical value of literature. However, how exactly does literature contribute to our ethical understanding? In Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions, Kenneth Asher argues that literary scholars should locate this question in the long and various history of moral philosophy. On the basis of his own reading of this history, Asher contends for the centrality of emotions in our ethical lives and shows how literature - novels, poetry, and drama - can each contribute to crucial emotional understanding. Individual chapters on T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw give detailed analyses of how this contribution takes shape even in modernist authors who try to reconfigure the very nature of the self.
Introduction
1. Literature as the recalibration of emotions
2. T. S. Eliot's emotive theory of poetry
3. D. H. Lawrence
primal consciousness and the function of emotion
4. Epistemology and ethics in Virginia Woolf
5. George Bernard Shaw
history as cosmic comedy
Conclusion.