Which sin to bear?
David E. Chinitz
'Which Sin to Bear?' highlights how Langston Hughes struggled with the tension between genuine artistic meaning and commercial concessions throughout his prolific career.

by Marian Eide (2002)
"Marian Eide argues that the central concern of James Joyce's writing was the creation of a literary ethics. Eide examines Joyce's ethical preoccupations throughout his work, particularly the tension between his commitment as an artist and his social obligations as a father and citizen during a tumultuous period of European history. Eide argues that his narrative suggests ethics, which etymologically signifies both "character" and "habitat," might be understood as an interaction between immediate and intimate processes (character) and more external enduring structures (habitat). Drawing on feminist theory, Eide focuses on the ideas of alterity and difference. The literary ethics developed in this book proceed from a textual focus in order to examine how our assumptions about what it means to read and interpret produce within each reader an implicit ethical practice. This is the first study devoted to Joyce's ethical philosophy as it emerges in his writing."--Jacket.
David E. Chinitz
'Which Sin to Bear?' highlights how Langston Hughes struggled with the tension between genuine artistic meaning and commercial concessions throughout his prolific career.
Gregg Camfield
In Sentimental Twain, Gregg Camfield examines the major and minor works of Mark Twain to redraw the boundaries between sentimentalism and realism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beginning by taking the reactions to the question of race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a test case, Camfield reveals that sentimental ethics persist, though buried, in American culture, and he argues that Americans' ambivalent responses to sentimentalism explain some of the continuing controversy surrounding Mark Twain's work. Specifically, he contends, insofar as the liberal agenda remains substantially sentimental - especially when dealing with issues of race - today's readers of Twain participate in the same dialectic between sentimental compassion and realistic cynicism that Twain himself confronted. Camfield then traces the cultural development of this ethical dialectic and follows Mark Twain's reactions to it, showing that Twain was a closet sentimentalist whose public attacks on sentimentalism veiled a deep longing for a more compassionate world. Throughout, Sentimental Twain is grounded in a discussion of philosophical contexts of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature, paying particular attention to the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, but looking forward to the Pragmatism of William James.
Martha C. Nussbaum
"This book is a study of ancient views about "moral luck." It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of the them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts." "The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its nontechnical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles."--Jacket.
Elizabeth Rottenberg
This is an exploration of the notion of 'drive' as it passes from Kant's need of reason, to Freud's concept of hallucinatory wish fulfillment, to the relentless force of indifferentiation in Flaubert's 'Bouvard and Pécuchet'.