1st Edition
Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster
By Valerie Wainwright
Copyright 2007
224 Pages
by
Routledge
222 Pages
by
Routledge
222 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Complicating a pervasive view of the ethical thought of the Victorians and their close relations, which emphasizes the domineering influence of a righteous and repressive morality, Wainwright discerns a new orientation towards an expansive ethics of flourishing or living well in Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and Forster. In a sequence of remarkable novels by these authors, Wainwright... Read more
Introduction; Part I What Matters (MOST); Chapter 1 Modes and Sensibilities; Chapter 2 Narrative Perspectives; Part II Ethical Designs; Chapter 3 On Being Un/reasonable; Chapter 4 Discovering Autonomy and Authenticity in North and South; Chapter 5 On Goods, Virtues and Hard Times; Chapter 6 Anatomizing Excellence; Chapter 7 The Magic in Mentalité; Chapter 8 Howards End and the Confession of Imperfection; Chapter 101 Afterword;
Biography
Valerie Wainwright is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Florence, Italy.
’Here is a solid, well-researched and clearly-presented argument on the ethical theories and presuppositions which affected the writing, the reading and the reviewing of a range of writers... The book is underpinned by very extensive reading indeed... Individual chapters each yield provocative readings, but best of all is the book's progress towards the present and the infuriating unwillingness of the authors' texts to sit still while we use it to perceive, or to reinforce, or to attack ethical positions. It is a book to re-read and to send the reader into new reading.’ The Gaskell Society Journal
