What Is Fiction For? : Literary Humanism Restored.

Intro -- Title -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1 Getting Real -- 1 Humanism and Its Discontents -- 2 The Mirror of Nature -- 3 Truth, Meaning, and Human Reality -- 4 Leavis and Wittgenstein (1): A Living Language -- 5 Leavis and Wittgenstein (2): The "Third Realm" -- Part 2 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 3 Against "The Meaning of the Work" -- 10 Reactive versus Interpretive Criticism -- 11 Houyhnhnm Virtue -- 12 Sterne and Sentimentalism -- Part 4 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.

Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the Humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.