Ethics, theory, and the novel
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
Criticism, interpretation, etc
x, 218 pages ; 24 cm
9780521452830, 9780521070317, 052145283X, 0521070317
29637772
I. The Ethical Unconscious. 1. Evaluative discourse: the return of the repressed. 2. A new turn toward the ethical. 3. The judgmental unconscious. 4. The libidinal unconscious. 5. Dynamic interrelatedness: or, the novel walking away with the nail
II. Social Beings and Innocents. 6. 'Bound in Charity' : Middlemarch. 7. Forgetting and disorientation in Anna Karenina. 8. Two ideas of innocence in The white peacock. 9. Into the ideological unknown: Women in love. 10. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley: the teller and the tale
III. Towards a New Evaluative Discourse