Ethics, Theory and the Novel

Description

The virtual suppression of ethical and evaluative discourse by current literary theory can be seen as the triumph of one post-Enlightenment tradition over others vital to a full account of humanity and literary value. In Ethics, Theory and the Novel David Parker shows that current silences about ethics are as damaging as the earlier political silences of Leavisism and New Criticism. He goes on to examine Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and novels by D.H. Lawrence, exploring the consequences for major literary works of the suppression of ethical traditions.

"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