Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880–1914

Jil Larson explores the conjunction between narrative, ethics and literary theory.

Jil Larson (Author)

9780521792820, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 February 2001

188 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.45 kg

"This is a valuable moment in a study by a critic with a rare combination of knowledge of recent moral philosophy, ethical criticism, and criticism of late-nineteenth-century British novelists." Victorian Studies

Drawing on interdisciplinary work in the field of ethics and literature by a diverse range of thinkers, including Martha Nussbaum, Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, Jil Larson offers new readings of late Victorian and turn-of-the-century British fiction, she shows how ethical concepts can transform our understanding of narratives, just as narratives make possible a valuable, contextualised moral deliberation. Focusing on novels by Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, Larson explores the conjunction of ethics and fin-de-siècle history and culture through a consideration of what narratives from this period tell us about emotion, reason, and gender, aestheticism, and such speech acts as promising and lying. This book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth century and modernism, and all interested in the conjunction between narrative, ethics and literary theory.

Acknowledgements
1. Ethics and the turn to narrative
2. Victorian history and ethics: anxiety at the fin-de-siecle
3. Emotion, gender, and ethics in fiction by Thomas Hardy, and the New Women 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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]