Agents and Lives

by S. L. Goldberg

Overview

Agents and Lives offers a new and 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'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 moral philosophers such as Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521394680
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/04/1993
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.94(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. 'Perpetually moralists' ... 'in a large sense'; 2. 'How to live' and 'How to live'; 3. Agents and lives: making moral sense of people; 4. 'Doing good to others': some reflections on Daniel Deronda; 5. Moral thinking in The Mill on the Floss; 6. Finding congenial matter: Pope and the art of life; 7. Literary judgement: making moral sense of poems; Appendix.