Literature and truth : : imaginative writing as a medium for ideas / / by Richard Lansdown.

• Superior document: Costerus New Series, Volume 222
• VerfasserIn: Lansdown, Richard, 1961-
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill Rodopi,, 2018.; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Costerus ; Volume 222.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (222 pages).

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.

Table of Contents

Front Matter -- -- Contents -- Preface -- Part 1 -- “Nothing Affirms and Therefore Never Lieth”: Cognitive and Non-cognitive Accounts of Imaginative Literature -- “The Birthplace of Truth”: Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis -- Part 2 -- The Printed Medium: Wordsworth and Books -- Stoicism and Christianity: Byron’s Don Juan -- Evangelicalism and Evolution: James Montgomery’s Pelican Island -- Tragedy and Evolution: Hardy’s The Woodlanders -- Humanism and After: Ibsen’s Little Eyolf -- Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro -- From the Other Shore: Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term -- Conclusion.