Garry L. Hagberg – författare

This edited collection investigates the kinds of moral reflection we can undertake within the imaginative worlds of literature. In philosophical contexts of ethical inquiry we can too easily forget that literary experience can play an important role in the cultivation of our ethical sensibilities. Because our ethical lives are conducted in the real world, fictional representations of this world can appear removed from ethical contemplation. However, as this stimulating volume shows, the dichotomy between fact and fiction cannot be so easily categorised. Moral perception, moral sensitivity, and ethical understanding more broadly, may all be developed in a unique way through our imaginative life in fiction.

Moral quandaries are often presented in literature in ways more linguistically precise and descriptively complete than the ones we encounter in life, whilst simultaneously offering space for contemplation. The twelve original chapters in this volume examine literary texts –including theatre and film – in this light, and taken together they show how serious reflection within fictional worlds can lead to a depth of humane insight. The topics explored include: the subtle ways that knowledge can function as a virtue; issues concerning our relations to and understanding of each other; the complex intertwining of virtues and vices in the modern world; and the importance of bringing to light and reconsidering ethical presuppositions. With an appreciation of the importance of richly contextualized particularity and the power of descriptive acuity, the volume maps out the territory that philosophical reflection and literary engagement share.        

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between ethics and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to the field – particularly one that shows how we can think more openly and creatively about the multiform powers of ethical narrative by considering ethically significant literature.

This volume offers an analytically acute and culturally rich way of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about the narrative structures that describe our ethical lives and what kind of distinctive conceptual, and in some cases personal, progress we can make by doing so. Given the extremely widespread interest in ethical issues, this volume will strike resonant chords far and wide on arrival, while offering something new in bringing together the study of long-form narrative, the language of moral psychology, and detailed literary case studies.

Given the vast expansion of narrative studies in recent years, the time for just such a volume is right.

There has been a steady stream of articles written on the relations between conceptions of meaning and the interpretation of literature, but there remains a need for a book that both introduces and significantly contributes to an elucidation and understanding of the ways that voice and tone contribute to the determination of meaning. Only rarely have considerations of voice been brought together with considerations of meaning-determination (the work of Stanley Cavell, covered in one section of this book, is a leading example). This volume thus offers an analytically acute and culturally rich way of understanding how it is that we can productively think philosophically about meaning in language and literature in a more inclusive, expansive, and indeed human way.