Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions

Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions addresses the issue of what precisely literature can contribute to our ethical awareness that philosophy cannot.

Kenneth Asher (Author)

9781107185951, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 April 2017

194 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.42 kg

'… Asher's work will be of interest to a wider field of scholars concerned with the question of how reading and an attentiveness to emotions allows us to know the ethical life.' Vivek Santayana, BSLS Reviews

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.

Subject Areas: Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]