Storytelling and Ethics : Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Output identifier
- 28878165
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.4324/9781315265018
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9781138244061
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This is a major volume (324 pp.) that required international co-operation and co-ordination. Double weighting is requested on the grounds that in terms of scholarly intensity, investment and weight it corresponds to double the value expected of a standard output in our judgement.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The book, volume 80 in the ‘Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature’ series, is the culmination of a three-year research project, ‘Ethics of Storytelling and the Experience of History in Contemporary Arts’, funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (2013-2016). Davis was centrally involved in the project from the application stage through to the workshops and the international conference held in 2015, where he was a plenary speaker. Editing duties on the volume were shared equally between the two editors. The volume is designed as a major intervention in debates about storytelling and ethics across the humanities. It is divided into four parts: ‘The Ethical Potential and Limits of Narrative’, ‘Narrative Temporalities: Imagining an Other Life’, ‘Narrative Engagements with Violence and Trauma’, and a concluding section in which the internationally respected scholar Professor Andreea Deciu Ritivoi reflects on the overall significance of the volume. All contributors were either participants in the project or directly commissioned by the editors. Davis co-wrote the Introduction (20 pages), which reviews the field of ethics and narrative studies. He also wrote the book’s first chapter, ‘Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge’ (14 pages), which analyses the ethical and epistemological status of fiction in the wake of Plato’s banishment of the poets in Book 10 of the Republic. The volume contains 18 chapters, with contributors from across the world working in literary studies, media studies, psychology, theatre studies and photography. In an 11-page review article (Storyworlds 2017), the eminent narrative scholar Jakob Lothe describes the volume as ‘an unusually strong and exceptionally timely volume of literary and cultural scholarship’, and as a ‘significant contribution to narrative ethics… [which] shows why and how this area of research is becoming, and needs to become, increasingly important – not only in the humanities but in the academy generally and beyond’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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