Overview

This book is an exercise in ethical criticism. It draws on and works with ideas and suggestions from two of its notable exponents, Wayne C. Booth and Martha C. Nussbaum, who propose that we regard cultural texts as ""friends"" with whom we can enjoy productive conversations that address contemporary challenges and developments, such as coercive control in gender relations, imperial and colonial thinking, and the centuries-long history of slavery. Throughout, attention is drawn to female agency in figures from Joan of Arc, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe through to Princess Diana. The book begins by looking closely at The Thousand and One Nights in terms of its wayward narratology, its displays of female power, and its significance for arguments over the relationship between the Enlightenment and the conceptual underpinnings of the Holocaust. Montesquieu in Persian Letters and Voltaire in Zadig destabilise any certainty that the Enlightenment was straightforward or easily definable. After evoking a slavery thread in chapters on Jane Austen's Persuasion and Mansfield Park, Patricia Rozema's film Mansfield Park, and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, the book concludes with a radical re-reading of Middlemarch.

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9781036408367

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John Docker is Honorary Professor in Humanities at the University of Sydney, Australia, and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Originally trained as a literary critic, he has published widely in cultural history, intellectual history, and media studies. His publications include In a Critical Condition (1984), The Nervous Nineties: Australian cultural life in the 1890s (1991), Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (1994), 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (2001), The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide (2008), and, with Ann Curthoys, Is History Fiction? (revised edition, 2010). His trilogy, Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi: An Ego Histoire, a Dictionary of Modernity, An Autobiography, a Romance, was published in 2020.

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