by Robert B. Pippin (2000)
"In Henry James and Modern Moral Life, Professor Robert Pippin argues that James's fiction reveals a sophisticated theory of moral understanding and moral motivation. Pippin claims that James is engaged in a distinctive kind of original thinking and reflecting on modern moral life in his novels and short stories.". "Pippin further contends that James, in his sensitivity to the precarious and confusing situation of moral understanding in modern societies, both avoids skepticism and powerfully presents the nature of moral claims and dependence.". "Professor Pippin offers new interpretations of Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, and several of James's short stories, including The Beast in the Jungle and The Turn of the Screw, to support his case for James's moral philosophy."--BOOK 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'.
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.
Confucius
"Formulated in the ruins of a society that had been founded on untenable spiritualistic concepts of governance, Confucius' philosophy postulated a humanistic social order that has survived as China's social ideal ever since." "Confucius' teachings are very literary in nature. The Analects is made up of dialogues, stories, and anecdotes, always aphoristic and full of poetic turns of thought."--BOOK JACKET.
Nancy Armstrong
Nancy Armstrong explores how Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen and Samuel Richardson created unforgettable protagonists who could overcome the limits of their social positions and how later, Victorian authors like Mary Shelley repackaged individuality in monstrous forms that threaten British society with collapse.