Agents and Lives

Agents and Lives offers a new and important rethinking of the traditional humanist view of literature. That tradition''s valuation of literature for its moral import is extended in a wider more complex open and exploratory understanding of those terms. Goldberg''s argument ranges across literature since the Renaissance focusing on examples from George Eliot''s novels and Pope''s poetry. An appendix assesses the relationship of his argument to recent accounts of literature offered by moral philosophers such as Iris Murdoch Bernard Williams Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty.