Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions

Kenneth Asher

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781107185951
• eBook ISBN: 9781316952924
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Literature as the Recalibration of Emotions
• Chapter 2 T. S. Eliot’s Emotive Theory of Poetry
• Chapter 3 D. H. Lawrence: Primal Consciousness and the Function of Emotion
• Chapter 4 Epistemology and Ethics in Virginia Woolf
• Chapter 5 George Bernard Shaw: History as Cosmic Comedy
• Conclusion
• Index