Ethics, Theory and the Novel

Description

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.

"Parker's discussion is intelligent and well-informed." Philosophy and Literature "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