Books by Kenneth (State University of New York Asher

Recently there has been a renewed interest in the ethical value of literature. However, how exactly does literature contribute to our ethical understanding? In Literature, Ethics, and the Emotions, Kenneth Asher argues that literary scholars should locate this question in the long and various history of moral philosophy. On the basis of his own reading of this history, Asher contends for the centrality of emotions in our ethical lives and shows how literature - novels, poetry, and drama - can each contribute to crucial emotional understanding. Individual chapters on T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Bernard Shaw give detailed analyses of how this contribution takes shape even in modernist authors who try to reconfigure the very nature of the self.

Asher investigates the effect of politics on the work of T. S. Eliot, particularly the influence of French reactionary thinking. The result is a re-appraisal of Eliot's view of literary history and theory, and new readings of major poems and plays. Asher also discusses how Eliot's ideology altered the study of literature for subsequent generations of critics.