Connections between literature and ethics have been explored recently by aestheticians (e.g., Eileen John) and moral philosophers (e.g., Martha Nussbaum) and can be found throughout the history of philosophy, from Hegel’s use of Antigone to explore conflicting duties to Plato’s and Aristotle’s ruminations on the moral effects of the representation of fictional characters. Further exploring these connections, this volume consists of 18 essays with 12 by philosophers and six by authors from other areas of the humanities, including English and French literature, drama, creative writing, law, and politics, suiting the interdisciplinary nature of the topic. The essays focus on five overlapping aspects of literature’s ethical dimension: (i) the structure and formation of character and its place in moral psychology; (ii) the role played in ethics by a kind of perceptual understanding that editor Garry Hagberg calls ‘poetic vision’; (iii) literature’s contribution to the formation and self-understanding of readers’ identities; (iv) the potential influence on moral development of engaging with literature; and (v) the historical precursors of contemporary discussions of this issue and the genealogies of central concepts.

Hagberg opens with an introduction outlining the book’s structure and concerns and summarizing the central points of each essay, making it clear that the collection “investigate[s] a number of literary and philosophical cases ... that bring to light both the intricacy and the interwoven character of ethical-aesthetic relations and how they manifest themselves in literary art” (1). Philosophers with an entrenched ‘analytic’ mindset looking for hard-and-fast definitions or firmly asserted conclusions about literature’s ethical nature or influence on moral psychology may be disappointed, since the direction taken by the collection’s authors is, in Hagberg’s terms, more ‘ocular’ than ‘argumentative,’ i.e., more concerned with providing ways of seeing ethical considerations as they occur in, or in relation to, particular literary works or literature as a medium than with ‘isms’ and bi-conditionals. In other words, the general direction of the thinking in the collection could be described as ‘post-Wittgensteinian.’ The ethical framework most compatible with this direction is a neo-Aristotelian one and—while not every essay takes an explicitly virtue ethical position—the holistic approach to ethics in these essays is most at home there.

The collection begins with one of the two outstanding essays of the volume, Nora Hämäläinen’s “Sophie, Antigone, Elizabeth—Rethinking Ethics by Reading Literature,” which discusses three ways of using literature in moral philosophizing. The first is a ‘thin’ use in which a fictional event is extracted/abstracted from its narrative and the literary form in which it is situated, reducing it to a mere “philosopher’s example” (18). The second is a ‘thick’ use in which a fictional text is mined for insights and perspectives that can inform a philosophical argument, but with the engagement with the text being substantial and taking into account literary form as well as content, thus not reducing its ethical import to any one of its situations, abstractly conceived. The third, ‘open-ended’ use doesn’t subordinate literary works in the service of philosophical point-making, but allows literature to disclose the complexities of the “existential dimension” (24) of lived moral experience in ways that can enrich and orient moral philosophizing by clarifying and enhancing understanding of the phenomena under consideration. While the benefits of this open-ended approach and its difference from the thick use could be elaborated further, Hämäläinen outlines a promising third way of philosophically engaging with artworks that likely will extend to engagements with examples and practices in areas of philosophy beyond ethics.

The other standout is Hagberg’s own contribution, “Othello’s Paradox: The Place of Character in Literary Experience,” which nicely explains how characterization—i.e., the form/structure of the presentation and reception of fictional characters—itself has moral import beyond the moral ‘content’ of characters’ aims and actions. Other noteworthy essays are: Noël Carroll’s “Character, Social Information, and the Challenge of Psychology,” which demonstrates how recent situationist scepticism about personal ‘character,’ even if admitted for the sake of argument, does not entail that fictions cannot offer moral-psychological and cognitive benefits through their portrayal of consistent character-types; J. Jeremy Wisnewski’s “The Moral Relevance of Literature and the Limits of Argument,” which shows how Heidegger and Aristotle offer resources for re-conceiving moral philosophy that are echoed in the literature of J.M. Coetzee; and Daniel Brudney’s “The Breadth of Moral Character,” which argues convincingly that Kantian practical reason is insufficient for properly grasping ethical situations and avoiding moral ‘aspect-blindness.’

One weakness of the collection is its final section, purporting to deal with “Historical Genealogies of Moral-Aesthetic Concepts” (303). While the three essays therein—Humberto Brito’s “In Praise of Aristotle’s Poetics,” Martin Donougho’s “Shaftsbury as Virtuoso,” and Jules Brody’s “Fate, Philology, Freud”—are interesting in their own right, they are not as clearly related to the theme of the collection. Another, albeit small, gripe is that, after Hämäläinen’s opening essay, subsequent contributions offering ‘thick’ uses of particular works of literature—e.g., Valerie Wainwright’s on Emma, Anthony Gash’s on Hamlet, Richard Dawson’s on Persuasion, and Alan Goldman’s on Pride and Prejudice—are less stimulating than they otherwise might have been in light of Hämäläinen’s ‘open-ended’ approach. (It should be noted that Robert Pierce’s and Wisnewski’s contributions on Hamlet and Coetzee’s Disgrace, respectively, tend more towards this open-ended approach.)

While few readers will find every essay to be equally useful, the collection has offerings that will be highly rewarding to those interested in moral philosophy (especially virtue ethics), philosophy of literature and aesthetics more generally, and metaphilosophy (for certain essays’ exemplification of an ‘ocular,’ post-Wittgensteinian alternative to more common approaches to philosophizing, and for the collection’s relevance to considerations of the use of thought experiments in philosophy). It will also appeal to those outside of philosophy with interests in literature in general, or the particular literary works and authors discussed, especially Jane Austin and Coetzee. It is whole-heartedly recommended for readers with these interests.