Psyche and Ethos

Jane F. Thrailkill, Victorian Studies Psyche and Ethos is a resounding success

John Paul Riquelme, Boston University, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 Based on four lectures at Oxford University in 2015, Amanda Anderson's brief but trenchant book concerning her distinctive alternative to ideological critique in literary studies deserves the attention of anyone who has been following the debates about literature and the hermeneutics of suspicion.

Michael Klenk, Metapsychology Anderson's argumentative strategy is promising and in broad outline compatible with some other recent defences against the challenge to morality (e.g. Sauer 2017). The way she puts literary sources to work in her argument is novel, refreshing, and illustrative; it shows how discussing the challenge to morality can benefit from novel, interdisciplinary perspectives on morality itself. Of course, many other aspects of the book deserve further attention, most pertinently the parts where she connects the discussion of the challenge to morality with an analysis of literary studies as a field.

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and the Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. She is the author of Bleak Liberalism (Chicago, 2016), The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, 2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Cornell, 1993). She is also co-editor of A Companion to George Eliot (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle (Princeton, 2002).

Introduction 1: Psychology Contra Morality 2: In the Middle of Life: The Vicissitudes of Moral Time 3: The Tragic and the Ordinary 4: A Human Science