These new essays explore central aspects of the ethical content of literature: character, its formation, and its role in moral discernment; poetic vision in the context of ethical understanding; self-identity and self-understanding; literature's role in moral growth and change; and the historical background of the ethical dimension of literature.

• Introduction: Five Ethical Aspects of Literature


• Part I: Ways of Reading for Ethical Content


• 1: Nora Hämäläinen: Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth: Rethinking Ethics by Reading Literature


• 2: Eileen John: Caring about Characters


• 3: Robert B. Pierce: Hamlet and the Problem of Moral Agency


• Part II: Matters of Character


• 4: Garry L. Hagberg: Othello's Paradox: The Place of Character in Literary Experience


• 5: Noel Carroll: Character, Social Information, and the Challenge of Psychology


• 6: Valerie Wainwright: Emma's Extravagance: Jane Austen and the Character-Situation Debate


• Part III: Literature, Subjectivity, and Poetic Vision


• 7: Richard Eldridge: The Question of Truth in Literature


• 8: J. Jeremy Wisnewski: The Moral Relevance of Literature and the Limits of Argument: Lessons from Heidegger, Aristotle, and Coetzee


• 9: Jonathan Strauss: An Endless Person: Heidegger, Breton, and Nadja at the Limits of Language


• Part IV: Language, Dialogical Identity, and Self-Understanding


• 10: Tony Gash: The Dialogic Self in Hamlet: On How Dramatic Form Transforms Philosophical Inquiry


• 11: Richard Dawson: 'The Power of Conversation': Jane Austen's Persuasion and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics


• 12: Stephen Mulhall: Quartet: Wallace's Wittgenstein, Moran's Amis


• Part V: Patterns and Possibilities of Moral Growth


• 13: Alan Goldman: Moral Development in Pride and Prejudice


• 14: Daniel Brudney: The Breadth of Moral Character


• 15: Mitchell S. Green: Learning to be Good (or Bad) in (or Through) Literature


• Part VI: Historical Genealogies of Moral-Aesthetic Concepts


• 16: Humberto Brito: In Praise of Aristotle's Poetics


• 17: Martin Donougho: Shaftesbury as Virtuoso: Or, The Birth of Aesthetics Out of a Spirit of Civility


• 18: Jules Brody: Fate, Philology, Freud


• Index

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has in recent years also been Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism, co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.