Introduction: Ethical Criticism

Abstract

We have not quite got over the belief, or the hope, that poetry, as I.A. Richards proclaimed, might be capable of saving us.¹ Literature has been decried as an elitist irrelevance surpassed by other, more accessible and more democratic cultural media, or as a site where abjection is given the possibility of sharing appalling desires with a gullible audience; but such views have not yet entirely defeated the resilient faith that something good happens to us when we read, that literature reflects and helps to create our moral sensibility, that it teaches us decency and humanity. The following pages present a less sanguine account of the ethics of fiction.