This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution . No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed institution, in whole or in part, without express written permission from the JHU Press . This revolutionary publishing model depends on mutual trust between user and publisher . Parker provides ethical analyses of scenes in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and D. H. Lawrence's The White Peacock, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. The book divides into two projects, since Parker also argues for the pertinence of ethics itself quite apart from the value of imaginative literature as a repository of serious ethical thought.
Part one makes the theoretical case, and part two applies the theory.
For the theory he takes as his champions Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, the late Australian critic, S. L. Golberg, and the Canadian political scientist, Charles Taylor. Murdoch and Goldberg are deployed as predecessors in his own practice of ethical analysis of literary works. Parker's claim is that imaginative literature exhibits the dynamic tensions of these conflicting ethical discourses. Parker's discussion is intelligent and well-informed. That said, this book seems to be as much a symptom of the malaise afflicting literary criticism as a cure.