Literature and Truth
Subtitle: Imaginative Writing As a Medium for Ideas
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 222
ISBN-13: 9789004356849
Subjects: Literature, history and criticism; Literature, philosophy; Literature, aesthetics
Description: In 'Literature and Truth' Richard Lansdown continues a discussion concerning the truth-bearing status of imaginative literature that pre-dates Plato. The book opens with a general survey of contemporary approaches in philosophical aesthetics, and a discussion of the contribution to the question made by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in particular, in his 'Speculum Mentis'. It then offers six case-studies from the Romantic era to the contemporary one as to how imaginative authors have variously dealt with bodies of discursive thought such as Stoicism, Christianity, evolution, humanism, and socialism. It concludes with a reading going in the other direction, in which the diary of Bronislaw Malinowski is seen in terms of the anthropologist?s reading habits during his legendary Trobriander fieldwork.