Ethics, Theory and the Novel

In Ethics, Theory and the Novel, David Parker brings together recent developments in moral philosophy and literary theory.

David Parker (Author)

9780521452830, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 October 1994

232 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.469 kg

"Ethics, Theory and the Novel is, then, both timely and accomplished; and a measure of its accomplishment is that it brings to this interdisciplinary 'turn' a subtlety of literary analysis that would have pleased even exponents of earlier, more intellectually insular, forms of humanist literary criticism." Philosophy and literature

The virtual suppression of explicit ethical and evaluative discourse by current literary theory can be seen as the momentary triumph of a sceptical post Enlightenment reflective tradition over others vital to a full account of human and literary worth. In Ethics, Theory and the Novel, David Parker brings together recent developments in moral philosophy and literary theory. He questions many currently influential movements in literary criticism, showing that their silences about ethics are as damaging as the political silences of Leavisism and New Criticism in the 1950s and 1960s. He goes on to examine Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and three novels by D. H. Lawrence, and explores the consequences for major literary works of the suppression of either the Judeo-Christian or the Romantic-expressivist ethical traditions. Where any one tradition becomes a master-narrative, he argues, imaginative literature ceases to have the deepest interest and relevance for us.

Part I. The Ethical Unconscious: 1. Evaluative discourse: the return of the repressed
2. A new turn toward the ethical
3. The judgmental unconscious
4. The libidinal unconscious
5. Dynamic interrelatedness: or, the novel walking away with the nail
Part II. Social Beings and Innocents: 6. 'Bound in Charity': Middlemarch
7. Forgetting and disorientation in Anna Karenina
8. Two ideas of innocence in The white peacock
9. Into the ideological unknown: Women in love
10. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley: the teller and the tale
Part III. Towards a new evaluative Discourse.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]