What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored

Author:   Bernard Harrison
Publisher:   Indiana University Press
ISBN:  

9780253014061


Pages:   620
Publication Date:   29 December 2014
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Our Price $156.95 Quantity:  
Add to Cart

Share |

What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored


Add your own review!

Overview

Full Product Details

Author:   Bernard Harrison
Publisher:   Indiana University Press
Imprint:   Indiana University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 3.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.971kg
ISBN:  

9780253014061


ISBN 10:   0253014069
Pages:   620
Publication Date:   29 December 2014
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

"Preface Introduction PART I: Getting Real 1. Humanism and its Discontents 2. The Mirror of Nature 3. Truth, Meaning and Reality 4. Leavis and Wittgenstein (I): A Living Language 5. Leavis and Wittgenstein (II): The ""Third Realm"" PART II: Character, Language and Human Worlds 6. Nature and Artifice 7. Virginia Woolf and ""The True Reality"" 8. Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction 9. The Limits of Authorial License in Our Mutual Friend PART III: Against ""The Meaning of the Work"" 10. Reactive versus Interpretive Criticism 11. Houyhnhnm Virtue 12. Sterne and Sentimentalism PART IV: The Skeptic Side 13. Reanimating the Author 14. Persons and Narratives 15. Reading and Reading-In 16. Meaning It Literally: Derrida and his Critics Revisited Epilogue: Telling the Great from the Good Notes Bibliography Index"

Reviews

What is Fiction For? offers a grand, and successful, rethinking of an entire discipline and the conceits, questions, and cares that animate it. It will be the first book that shows literary theorists and philosophers how to divorce, once and for all, a defense of humanism from a retreat to Enlightenment and Romantic exaggerations about the human and its place in the world. John Gibson, University of Louisville--John Gibson, University of Louisville


What is Fiction For? offers a grand, and successful, rethinking of an entire discipline and the conceits, questions, and cares that animate it. It will be the first book that shows literary theorists and philosophers how to divorce, once and for all, a defense of humanism from a retreat to Enlightenment and Romantic exaggerations about the human and its place in the world. -John Gibson, University of Louisville This book is interdisciplinary in the best sense of this term: firmly rooted in both philosophy and literary studies, it brings philosophy to bear, illuminatingly, on literary texts while also enlisting the latter for support of an innovative theory of meaning in language. -Leona Toker, Hebrew University of Jerusalem What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored brings the disciplines of literature and philosophy to bear on a single subject: the necessity of humane letters in education, the capacity of literature to transform and elevate the mind. -Academic Questions The book is wide ranging and deeply engaged with a broad range of theoretical perspectives... Recommended. -Choice This book is not an easy read, but the effort is rewarding since its argument may very well represent a cornerstone in the history of ideas. It can certainly be a cornerstone of one's career: if one is a student in the humanities and has not yet developed needed certainties, this book can provide the grounding needed to develop them. The book's ideas are stoically, logically, and brilliantly defended... Harrison's account ultimately defines itself as mandatory reading for anyone concerned with literature and literary humanism. -Partial Answers One great virtue of the book is that Harrison's marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work. It takes someone of Harrison's philosophical training to articulate the theoretical basis for his defense of literary humanism, and it takes his gifts as a critic to show what this humanism looks like in practice. -Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism All those who care about literature, including admirers of the New Criticism, are indebted to Bernard Harrison for demonstrating, at length and in painstaking theoretical detail, the philosophical validity for the twenty-first century of 'merely what every common reader has always taken to be involved in talking about books. -The Weekly Standard


What is Fiction For? offers a grand, and successful, rethinking of an entire discipline and the conceits, questions, and cares that animate it. It will be the first book that shows literary theorists and philosophers how to divorce, once and for all, a defense of humanism from a retreat to Enlightenment and Romantic exaggerations about the human and its place in the world. -John Gibson, University of Louisville This book is interdisciplinary in the best sense of this term: firmly rooted in both philosophy and literary studies, it brings philosophy to bear, illuminatingly, on literary texts while also enlisting the latter for support of an innovative theory of meaning in language. -Leona Toker, Hebrew University of Jerusalem What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored brings the disciplines of literature and philosophy to bear on a single subject: the necessity of humane letters in education, the capacity of literature to transform and elevate the mind. -Academic Questions The book is wide ranging and deeply engaged with a broad range of theoretical perspectives... Recommended. -Choice This book is not an easy read, but the effort is rewarding since its argument may very well represent a cornerstone in the history of ideas. It can certainly be a cornerstone of one's career: if one is a student in the humanities and has not yet developed needed certainties, this book can provide the grounding needed to develop them. The book's ideas are stoically, logically, and brilliantly defended... Harrison's account ultimately defines itself as mandatory reading for anyone concerned with literature and literary humanism. -Partial Answers One great virtue of the book is that Harrison's marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work. It takes someone of Harrison's philosophical training to articulate the theoretical basis for his defense of literary humanism, and it takes his gifts as a critic to show what this humanism looks like in practice. -Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism All those who care about literature, including admirers of the New Criticism, are indebted to Bernard Harrison for demonstrating, at length and in painstaking theoretical detail, the philosophical validity for the twenty-first century of 'merely what every common reader has always taken to be involved in talking about books. -The Weekly Standard In What Is Fiction For? Harrison makes a strong case for the ongoing relevance of the study of iterature as a serious and worthwhile intellectual pursuit. -Eighteenth-Century Fiction


What is Fiction For? offers a grand, and successful, rethinking of an entire discipline and the conceits, questions, and cares that animate it. It will be the first book that shows literary theorists and philosophers how to divorce, once and for all, a defense of humanism from a retreat to Enlightenment and Romantic exaggerations about the human and its place in the world. - John Gibson, University of Louisville This book is interdisciplinary in the best sense of this term: firmly rooted in both philosophy and literary studies, it brings philosophy to bear, illuminatingly, on literary texts while also enlisting the latter for support of an innovative theory of meaning in language. - Leona Toker, Hebrew University of Jerusalem


What is Fiction For? offers a grand, and successful, rethinking of an entire discipline and the conceits, questions, and cares that animate it. It will be the first book that shows literary theorists and philosophers how to divorce, once and for all, a defense of humanism from a retreat to Enlightenment and Romantic exaggerations about the human and its place in the world. -John Gibson, University of Louisville This book is interdisciplinary in the best sense of this term: firmly rooted in both philosophy and literary studies, it brings philosophy to bear, illuminatingly, on literary texts while also enlisting the latter for support of an innovative theory of meaning in language. -Leona Toker, Hebrew University of Jerusalem What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored brings the disciplines of literature and philosophy to bear on a single subject: the necessity of humane letters in education, the capacity of literature to transform and elevate the mind. -Academic Questions The book is wide ranging and deeply engaged with a broad range of theoretical perspectives... Recommended. -Choice This book is not an easy read, but the effort is rewarding since its argument may very well represent a cornerstone in the history of ideas. It can certainly be a cornerstone of one's career: if one is a student in the humanities and has not yet developed needed certainties, this book can provide the grounding needed to develop them. The book's ideas are stoically, logically, and brilliantly defended... Harrison's account ultimately defines itself as mandatory reading for anyone concerned with literature and literary humanism. -Partial Answers One great virtue of the book is that Harrison's marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work. It takes someone of Harrison's philosophical training to articulate the theoretical basis for his defense of literary humanism, and it takes his gifts as a critic to show what this humanism looks like in practice. -Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism


Author Information

Bernard Harrison is Emeritus E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. He is author of Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory; The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion; and (with Patricia Hanna) Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions
Latest Reading Guide

MRG2025CC

 

Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty
Shopping cart
Mailing List