Reflections on Henry James as a Novelist with Ethics

In a 1999 article in PMLA Lawrence Buell highlights six major strands of thought influencing the current revival of ethical criticism in literary studies. The first is an approach interested in the "moral thematics and underlying value commitments of literary texts and their implied value," an approach Buell sees as a modernized version of the "Arnoldian-Leavisite conception of literature as ethical reflection." A second is "the intellectual history of moral thought from Puritanism to transcendentalism to pragmaticism and beyond," and a third the interest in the ethics of narrative and genre typified in the work of Wayne Booth, as well as more recently in works like Adam Newton's Narrative Ethics (8).