S. L. Goldberg – författare

Professor Goldberg offers a reading of King Lear that avoids the pitfall alternatives of idealism, moralism, absurdism, and redemptionist sentimentality. He sees the play as a challenge to our moral sense and our need for a feeling of natural justice, but as undercutting all easy answers. That it does not permit them is one of its main points. The essay traces a developing response to the whole of the action as it proceeds, making no premature judgments. It springs from a considered sense of what a poetic drama is and how it works: especially how it presents 'character' and how the views of the characters relate to the whole intention of the play and the author's own vision of life. Many readers are likely to think this the most satisfactory attempt they have yet read to do justice to this great play; because Professor Goldberg responds to it with intelligence and sensitivity, because he does not impose a ready-made meaning on it, and because he has thought about Shakespearean drama in a way which makes this brief book a distinct stage in the history of criticism since Bradley and Wilson Knight.

Agents and Lives offers an important rethinking of the traditional 'humanist' view of literature. That tradition's valuation of literature for its 'moral import' is extended in a wider, more complex, open, and exploratory understanding of those terms. Goldberg demonstrates the way in which literature combines a sense of people as voluntary agents and as moral beings whose lives extend well beyond the voluntary and deliberate, manifesting themselves in feeling and suffering as well as in action. The book argues that this double way of thinking about people corresponds to traditional literary criticism's most vital insights into the way works of literature both depict and themselves manifest modes of human life. Goldberg's argument ranges across literature since the Renaissance, focusing on examples from George Eliot's novels and Pope's poetry. An appendix assesses the relationship of his argument to recent accounts of literature offered by a variety of moral philosophers.

Australian Cultural History is a 1988 text which opens up new ways of looking at Australian society, culture and history. The diverse and distinguished authors range across religion, literature, history, popular ideas, painting, ballet, patronage and education. The approach to culture throughout is inclusive, and pluralist - each essay extends the reader's understanding of what makes Australian culture, in a lively and provocative manner. These questions have relevance to all interested in 19th and 20th century social development.