Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Christine Reynier

• Publisher: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9782367813899
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the last few decades, in the wake of the 'Ethical Turn', contemporary literature has been examined through the prism of the ethics of alterity. Yet, this may not be consis­tently the case with Victorian and Modernist literature, since relatively few of the authors of those periods have elicited such critical and ­theoretical scrutiny. The articles in this volume set off to re-read Victorian and Modernist literature in the light of the ethics of alterity and investigate whether the post-Auschwitz, contemporary period breaks away from or favours lines of continuity with the productions of the earlier era. It also strives to address works which do not belong to the canon, focusing alternately on great authors and less known artists, on what has been termed 'minor' texts or genres that are less visible than the novel. Approaching literature by examining the relations between ethics and aesthetics, even while adopting an ethical approach, helps the authors in this volume contribute to revising the contemporary, Modernist and Victorian canon in English Literature.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• On Tears Shed at Brownlow Hill in the Summer of 1866: Alterity, Politics, and Style in Josephine Butler’s Writings
• ‘I hold it towards you’: Alterity in Lyric Address
• Modernist Ethics, Critique, and Utopia
• Sovereign Subjects Stephen Dedalus, Irish Conscience, and Ulysses’s Utopian Ethos
• D.H. Lawrence’s Mr Noon, its Significant Other, and the Physioethics of Reading
• Towards an Ethics of Singularity: The Shattered Mirror of Identity in Ford Madox Ford’s Parades End
• Writers, Friends and Lovers: Virginia Woolf, G.E. Moore and the Aesthetics of Personal Relations
• The Relation to the Other in John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929)
• Beyond Alterity—Within Alterity: Edith Sitwell’s Self-Reflexive Assessments of Modernism
• ‘To feel pity even for the planets’: The Aporias of Responsibility in Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter
• The Lay Community: Weil, Murdoch, Badiou and the Ethics of Other-Centeredness
• Moral Questions and Ethical Answers: On some Responsibilities of British Satire in the 20th and 21st Centuries
• James Kelman’s Confrontational Ethics in You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free
• On ‘Personal Affection and the Appreciation of what is Beautiful’: Rewriting and Rethinking Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
• The Ethics of Re-Writing: Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005)
• Of Friends, Enemies and Neighbours: Political Theology and the Ethics of Alterity in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
• Responsibility in Verse: William Wordsworth and J.H. Prynne
• Notes on contributors