The Ethics in Literature

The question of ethics has dominated recent developments within the humanities. This volume brings together the most recent theories of ethics and reading and applies them to a wide variety of literary texts. Ethical and literary issues explored by the contributors include biography, sensibility, national identity, feminism, postcolonialism, religion, subjectivity and stylistics. Literary authors and philosophers/theorists discussed range from Shakespeare and Mary Shelley to Michele Roberts and Salman Rushdie, and from Kant and Coleridge to Derrida and Levinas.

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Literature and the Return to Ethics; A.Hadfield, D.Rainsford and T.Woods SECTION I: SELF AND HISTORY Ethics, Autobiography and the Will: Stephen Spender's 'World Within World'; R.Freadman 'Ethics Cannot Afford to be Nation-Blind': Saul Bellow and the Problem of the Victim; A.Hadfield Have You Reread Levinas Lately? Transformations of the Face in Post-Holocaust Fiction; N.Ravvin SECTION II: AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY The Unbearable Lightness of Acts; V.Wagner Secret Agent, Absent Agent? Ethical-Stylistic Aspects of Anarchy in Conrad's 'The Secret Agent'; R.Kolani John Cheever's 'The Swimmer' and the Abstract Standpoint of Kantian Moral Philosophy; R.Hughes and K.O'Hara SECTION III: LITERATURE, INTERPRETATION AND ETHICS Understanding and Ethics in Coleridge: Description, Evaluation and Otherness; D.Haney Derrida, Rushdie and the Ethics of Mortality; C.McNab 'Role Models', Conversation and the Ethical Drive; I.MacKillop SECTION IV: SYMPATHY FOR THE OTHER Feminist Ethical Reading Strategies in Mich? Roberts's 'In the Red Kitchen': Hysterical Reading and Making Theory Hysterical; S.Rowland Sensibility and Suffering in Rhys and Nin; A.Gibson Moral Capacities and Other Constraints; C.Mej?SECTION V: PUBLIC MORALITY 'Sweet Dreams, Monstered Nothings': Catachresis in Kant and 'Coriolanus'; O.de Graef Literature and Existentialist Ethics in Simone de Beauvoir's 'Moral Period'; T.Keefe Sympathy and Science in 'Frankenstein'; J.M.Caldwell Index

JANIS MCLARREN CALDWELL Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University ORTWIN DE GRAEF Lecturer in English and Literary Theory at Katholiecke Universiteit Leuven RICHARD FREDMAN Professor of English and Director of the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography at La Trobe University ANDREW GIBSON Reader in English at Royal Holloway, University of London DAVID P. HANEY Associate Professor of English at Auburn University, Alabama REBECCA HUGHES Deputy Director of the Centre for English Language Education at the University of Nottingham TERRY KEEFE formerly Head of French and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Leicester University RUTH KOLANI recently received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Dallas IAN MACKILLOP Reader in English Literature at the University of Sheffield CHRIS MCNAB PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth CRISTINA MEJIA obtained her BA in Art History from McGill University KIERON O'HARA Researcher in the Artificial Intelligence Group at the Department of Psychology, Nottingham University NORMAN RAVVIN works as a critic, novelist and teaches at the University of New Brunswick SUSAN ROWLAND Lecturer in English in the School of Humanities at the University of Greenwich VALERIA WAGNER gained her PhD from the University of Geneva