Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory

Divided into four descriptive sections―"Theory and the Ethics of Literary Text," "Confronting the Difficult: The Ethics of Race and Power," "Making Darkness Visible: The Ethical Implications of Narrative as Witness," and "Ways of Seeing: The Diversity of Applied Ethical Criticism"―this unprecedented collection of essays traces the interpretive, pedagogic, and theoretical concerns inherent in the study of literature, ethics, and modes of criticism. Wayne C. Booth's "Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple," J. Hillis Miller's "How to Be 'in Tune with the Right' in The Golden Bowl," Susan Gubar's "Poets of Testimony," and Martha C. Nussbaum's "Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism" are among the fifteen essays included. Bringing together ethical criticism's most important theorists, Mapping the Ethical Turn is a cohesive introduction to a reading paradigm that continues to influence the ways in which we think and feel about the stories that mark our lives.

Todd F. Davis is Associate Professor of English at Goshen College and the author of articles on twentieth-century American and British literature.

Kenneth Womack is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State Altoona and the coeditor of Twentieth-Century Bibliography and Textual Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography and of three volumes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series, among other works on literature and literary theory.