A team of leading contributors from both philosophical and literary backgrounds have been brought together in this impressive book to examine how works of literary fiction can be a source of knowledge. Together, they analyze the important trends in this current popular debate. The innovative feature of this volume is that it mixes work by literary theorists and scholars with work of analytic philosophers that combined together provide a comprehensive statement of the variety of ways in which works of fiction can engage questions of worldly interest. It uses the problem of cognitive value to explore: literature’s contribution to ethical life literature’s ability to engage in social and political critique the role narrative plays in opening up possibilities of moral, aesthetic, experience and selfhood This remarkable volume will attract the attention of both literature and philosophy scholars with its statement of the various ways that literature and life take an interest in one another.

Locating literature at the intersection of distinct areas of thinking on the nature, scope and methods of knowledge - philosophy, theology, science, and the law - this book engages with literary texts across periods and genres to address questions of probability, problems of evidence, the uses of experiment and the poetics and ethics of doubt.

Locating literature at the intersection of distinct areas of thinking on the nature, scope and methods of knowledge - philosophy, theology, science, and the law - this book engages with literary texts across periods and genres to address questions of probability, problems of evidence, the uses of experiment and the poetics and ethics of doubt.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

The uses of fiction in early modern Europe are far more varied than is often assumed by those who consider fiction to be synonymous with the novel. The contributors to this volume demonstrate the significant role that fiction plays in early modern European culture, not only in a variety of its literary genres, but also in its formation of philosophical ideas, political theories, and the law. The volume explores these uses of fiction in a series of interrelated case studies, ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution and examining the work of, among others, Montaigne, Corneille, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Diderot. It asks: Where does fiction live, and thrive? Under what conditions, and to what ends? It suggests that fiction is best understood not as a genre or a discipline but, instead, as a frontier: one that demarcates literary genres and disciplines of knowledge and which, crucially, allows for the circulation of ideas between them.

Critics of fiction have long been aware that the romantic movement in Europe and America gave a powerful impulse to the art of fiction. The exact nature of that impulse has resisted analysis like so much associated with romanticism. In Fiction as Knowledge John McCormick reaches for precision, proposing that much of the vitality of modern fiction derives from romantic conceptions of history which made available to fiction not merely historical subject matter, but new perceptions of reality, present and past, that pervade the work of many of the greatest writers of the post-romantic period. Beginning with Herder and Hegel, McCormick describes those qualities in historical thought that were revolutionary in the early nineteenth century and rich in meaning for the future. Most prominent of these was the emergence of the idea of individuality, not only in society but also in history. The author demonstrates the vitality of the romantic impulse in the work of seven major novelists of the twentieth century. Marcel Proust's apprehensions of nature in his great novel are seen as Wordsworthian, while as the novel unfolds, history in the form of event and system of organization comes to dominate and to offer a paradigm of the workings of the post-romantic historical imagination. William Faulkner and Andr Malraux are shown to confront history directly, although they do not write "historical" fiction. Herman Broch, Robert Musil, and Henri de Montherlant, uncomfortable with traditional romantic attitudes, still make fullest use of Romantic historical insight to extend the range of fiction as knowledge. Ernest Hemingway, by contrast, is seen as intuitive, a pure product of his novelist's intelligence as opposed to his latter-day romantic anti-intellectualism. Fiction as Knowledge supplies critical insight into the form of the novel as well as into the seven novelists under discussion. Not least, the book is a warning against contemporary anti-historical bias and an appeal to the cultivation of historical consciousness. John McCormick is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, and Honorary Fellow of English and Literature at the University of York. He is the author of George Santayana: A Biography, Catastrophe and Imagination, and The Middle Distance, by Transaction.