Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas

Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel is concerned with the possibility of a postmodern ethics of reading, which sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction. Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel, and also contains detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book’s originality is its concentration on a range of modernist and postmodern novels which have seldom if ever served as the basis for a larger ethical theory of fiction.