| Summary: | The ethics of literature, formalists have insisted, resides in the moral quality of a character, a story, perhaps the relation between author and reader. But in the wake of deconstruction and various forms of criticism focusing on difference, the ethical question has been freshly negotiated by literary studies. This text, winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize, makes a case for understanding narrative as ethics. Assuming an intrinsic and necessary connection between the two, Newton explores the ethical consequences of telling stories and fictionalizing character, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness and reader in the process. He treats these relations as defining properties of prose fiction, of particular import in 19th- and 20th-century texts.
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