Literature and Truth

Imaginative Writing as a Medium for Ideas
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-90-04-35684-9
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 222, 222 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 200 g

Reihe: Costerus New Series

In Literature and Truth Richard Lansdown continues a discussion concerning the truth-bearing status of imaginative literature that pre-dates Plato. The book opens with a general survey of contemporary approaches in philosophical aesthetics, and a discussion of the contribution to the question made by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in particular, in his Speculum Mentis. It then offers six case-studies from the Romantic era to the contemporary one as to how imaginative authors have variously dealt with bodies of discursive thought such as Stoicism, Christianity, evolution, humanism, and socialism. It concludes with a reading going in the other direction, in which the diary of Bronislaw Malinowski is seen in terms of the anthropologist’s reading habits during his legendary Trobriander fieldwork.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lansdown, Richard

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface and Acknowledgements

Part 1
1 “Nothing Affirms and Therefore Never Lieth”: Cognitive and Non-cognitive Accounts of Imaginative Literature
2 “The Birthplace of Truth”: Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis

Part 2
3 The Printed Medium: Wordsworth and Books
4 Stoicism and Christianity: Byron’s Don Juan
5 Evangelicalism and Evolution: James Montgomery’s Pelican Island
6 Tragedy and Evolution: Hardy’s The Woodlanders
7 Humanism and After: Ibsen’s Little Eyolf
8 Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro
9 From the Other Shore: Malinowski’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Richard Lansdown, Ph.D. (1989), University College London, is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Groningen. He has published numerous books and articles on English Romantic literature, as well as The Autonomy of Literature (2001).