(with Ansgar Nünning and Herbert Grabes): Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values

Sibylle Baumbach, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning (eds.)

Literature and Values

Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing

Norms and Values

Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values Ed. by Sibylle Baumbach, Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning.- Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009

(GCSC; 2) ISBN 978-3-86821-143-6

Cover design: Brigitta Disseldorf

© WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009 ISBN 978-3-86821-143-6 No part of this book, covered by the copyright hereon, may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without prior permission of the publisher.

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VALUES IN LITERATURE AND THE VALUE OF LITERATURE: LITERATURE AS A MEDIUM FOR REPRESENTING, DISSEMINATING AND

CONSTRUCTING NORMS AND VALUES

SIBYLLE BAUMBACH, HERBERT GRABES & ANSGAR NÜNNING

1. Introduction: values in literature – the value of literature

“Issues of value and evaluation tend to recur whenever literature, art, and other forms of cultural activity become a focus of discussion, whether in informal or institutional context”, Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1995: 177) observes at the beginning of her fine essay on the intricate and thorny topic of “Value/Evaluation”. Debates about value(s) and evaluation, and the ethical dimension of literature have indeed been perennial is-sues in literary criticism and literary theory, even “central to Western critical theory for at least the past two hundred years” (ibid.). The last two decades, however, have witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between literature and values and the ethical dimension of literature, culminating in what has been dubbed ‘the ethical turn’ and the re-emergence of ethical criticism. While the developments and new perspec-tives subsumed under such umbrellas as ‘the ethical turn’, ‘ethical criticism’ or ‘the ethics of criticism in the age after value’ have been mapped by a number of informa-tive surveys (cf. e.g. Antor 1996; Eaglestone 1997, 2003; Davis/Womack 2001), the complex and reciprocal relationship between literature and value have not received as much attention as it arguably deserves: “[T]he importance of literature and other media for the dissemination of ethical values within a culture has not yet been duly acknowl-edged and submitted to scrutiny” (Grabes 2008: 3-4).

The present volume seeks to redress the balance, not by providing yet another mapping of the ethical turn or a meta-summary of the new perspectives and transfor-mations that the renewed interest in ethical criticism has brought about, but by looking more closely at the relationship between literature and values and by exploring the characteristics, functions and roles of literary texts that make literature so fascinating and valuable (cf. Erll/Grabes/Nünning 2008). The main goals of this introduction are to gauge the relationship between literature and values, and to provide a provisional overview of some of the most important functions of literature, while also giving a brief survey of the wide range of topics and perspectives that the contributions that follow deal with and explore.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, of course, that the relationship between lit-erature and value, and the views that have been put forward about this topic, have themselves been subject to historical change. While many authors, critics and theorists have maintained that the value of literature is inseparable from the ways in which norms and values are represented, others have equally forcefully asserted that the

SIBYLLE BAUMBACH, HERBERT GRABES & ANSGAR NÜNNING 2

realms of art and moral values, or of aesthetics and ethics, are oceans apart and should never be confused. In the ‘Preface’ to his equally famous and infamous novel The Pic-ture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, for example, bluntly proclaimed: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” Two more quotations from the Preface may serve to show just how important it was for Wilde to dissociate literature as well as the other arts from morality and ethical values:

The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

Whether or not Oscar Wilde and his works lived up to his own sayings, or to his im-moral reputation, may be open to debate (cf. V. Nünning 2002), but the majority of his contemporaries certainly did not seem to share this avant-garde view of the aestheti-cists, who wanted to divorce literature and art from morality once and for all. On the contrary, Wilde’s views were generally regarded as a challenge to ingrained Victorian assumptions about the central function, and value, of literature. As is well known, Wilde himself was severely taken to task later on in his life for having published what was regarded as demoralising literature, and the alleged immorality of his novel was even publicly debated in court in order to ‘prove’ that The Picture of Dorian Gray was an immoral book, which in turn served to demonstrate that its author Oscar Wilde held immoral views himself. In doing so, the attorney and judge as well as a host of com-mentators in the newspapers merely did what Victorians critics, publishers and readers had been doing for decades, namely exploring in how far a given literary work served to disseminate Christian and ethical values and to promote moral behaviour. Peter Keating (1989: 252) aptly described this “unwritten code”: “They acquiesced in what amounted to a gigantic moral conspiracy with publishers, libraries, reviewers, editors, and easily-shocked readers.” Though the case of Oscar Wilde is, of course, much more complex than these brief observations may imply, they may suffice to illustrate that in the Victorian fin-de-siècle, there was no longer an implicit general agreement on what the role of literature vis-à-vis moral values was taken to be.

Several decades later, in the heyday of poststructuralism and postmodernism, widespread agreement prevailed again, but amidst an era of poststructuralist relativ-ism, readers and writers, publishers and critics now seemed to agree that the realms of literature and morality were indeed two entirely separate spheres. For a while it really seemed that we were living in an ‘Age after Value’ and that the question of whether literature had anything to do with values seemed irrelevant at best, meaningless at worst. Influential postmodern writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover or Thomas Pynchon foregrounded in their works the “Con-tingencies of Value” (1988) Barbara Herrnstein Smith and many other critics presented as the most advanced view. Yet – as E. Ann Kaplan pointed out in her otherwise friendly review of the book – “the preoccupation with context, with multiple variables,

INTRODUCTION 3

with instability, and with historical accounting cannot, in themselves, explain gender and power differentials” (Kaplan 1990: 53). How else to explain the radically different opinion held by many of her American colleagues living under quite similar circum-stances – as it became all too evident when Herrnstein Smith raised a scandal when first presenting her view at an MLA convention and as it was forcefully presented a few years later by Richard A. Etlin in his In Defense of Humanism: Value in the Arts and Letters (1996).

The more poststructuralist and constructivist epistemology has made clear that our common ‘truths’ are to a previously unrealised extent culturally constructed, the more the necessity of values that provide individual and communal orientation has become felt. At the same time, the weight of traditional values has become more contested and the readiness of people to be directly preached to has diminished considerably.

What therefore has become more important is the indirect promotion of values by supplying moral models and presenting practical examples of human behaviour. This is a field in which literature and the media seem to be particularly efficient because of their wide range of aesthetic possibilities and because readers, listeners or viewers are less involved and more open to exterior influences than agents in the life-world whose practical interest is at stake. When Richard Rorty sought to demonstrate that what we need on account of our physical and psychic vulnerability to cope with contingency is solidarity (Rorty 1989), he reverted to literary examples instead of relying solely on his power of argumentation. As Wayne C. Booth observed, “stories are our major moral teachers” (Booth 2001: 20). It is through narratives and fictional worlds that we are sensitised to ethical questions and moral inquiries insofar as they open up possible ways of life, which we can either subscribe to or reject. Literature and the media thus provide the incentives for engaging in ethical discourse by confronting us with both admirable and corrupted characters, triggering our moral reasoning in every character and each event they depict.

In order to be able to gauge the manifold and subtle ways in which literary texts can indirectly disseminate values, the critic and cultural historian needs equally subtle theoretical and methodological tools. Though the productiveness of the theory industry has been second to none, there are not very many approaches that would aptly serve the critic interested in discerning values. One of them is the ethical and rhetorical ap-proach to narrative fiction pioneered by Wayne C. Booth and further developed by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. It is based on the hypothesis that narrative tech-nique can have profound ethical and moral implications and that writers use narrative and rhetorical strategies in order to disseminate their world-view and hierarchy of val-ues. As Wolfgang G. Müller (2008) has convincingly demonstrated, narrative tech-nique and point of view can have profound ethical implications. Strategies of mediat-ing moral values and alerting readers to moral issues and problems will be related to basic modes of narration such as (1) authorial narration with an omniscient narrator, which provides a moral orientation for the reader through comment and reflection; (2) point of view narration, which makes it the reader’s task to decode the moral qualities

INTRODUCTION 5

sions of life, norms and values (manifested e.g. in social interaction, texts in the liter-ary tradition, and media of other symbolic systems). Secondly, literary texts can repre-sent valid, alternative or different norms and values by textual means and literary tech-niques (configuration): Literary works sometimes disseminate, generate or project so-cially sanctioned or desired, yet more often unsanctioned, excluded and repressed forms of life as well as their underpinning values and norms. Therefore, they can be viewed as “experiments in life” (George Eliot; cf. Nünning 2008), i.e. as models and test cases that generate possible worlds as well as idealized or alternative hierarchies of values through a series of specifically aesthetic procedures or literary forms. In turn, such literary productions of norms and values are, thirdly, able to have an effect on extra-literary reality (refiguration): Literature, to no insignificant degree, has contrib-uted (and still does so) to the forming as well as the stabilization of norms and values, and social conceptions of a good life.

The essays in this volume focus both on the representation of cultural norms and values in literature and on the construction-aspect of literature as an active medium in the generation or production of norms and values. In doing so, they emphasize that the stages between prefiguration and configuration on the one hand, and between configu-ration and refiguration on the other, are always inextricably intertwined. Just as litera-ture heavily draws on existent norms and values, which are translated into the fictional sphere to be further investigated, expanded, or altered to probe their boundaries, soci-ety does not only rely on literature for the dissemination of its values but also uses it for the affirmation of its moral concepts and social norms. Literature, society and the media, therefore, engage in a dynamic negotiation and exchange of norms and values, which are constructed, maintained, and revived in a constant dialogue between them.

The first question to be addressed is of how, and with what literary methods or techniques, cultural notions of norms and values are represented in a given text. From this perspective, literature comes into view as a medium of the representation of extra-literary norms and values and as a medium that is capable of constructing or generat-ing new or alternative hierarchies of norms and values. Secondly, literature has always served as a medium for the dissemination of norms and values, be it those generally accepted by society or alternative values. Thirdly, therefore, literature appears as a medium for the construction of norms and values. Another question to be addressed concerns the connections between configuration and refiguration: What functions can literature fulfil for the development, modelling, alteration, critique, and even destruc-tion of norms and values (cf. Zapf 2001, 2002)?

Two dimensions of the relations of literary works to extra-literary norms and val-ues – and thus also two fundamental directions for the special potential of literature in culture – should therefore come into focus: The first dimension concerns the specific potential of the medium of literature, through its aesthetic forms, to thematise, repre-sent, and disseminate norms and values in their cultural contexts. Secondly, and deriv-ing from the aesthetic form, the potential of the medium of literature as well as of other media to actively construct and generate norms and values, as well as to question

SIBYLLE BAUMBACH, HERBERT GRABES & ANSGAR NÜNNING 6

and critique, prevailing value-hierarchies and collective views of what constitutes a ‘good life’ is also of interest. In short, the focus of this volume is on exploring the role of literature as a medium of the representation and reflection, the dissemination and problematising, and the modelling and construction of norms and values.

In order to avoid possible misunderstandings we should like to emphasize that the concept of ‘mimesis,’ however, does not refer to a naïve concept of mere reflection, but rather to theoretical concepts emphasizing the active creation of realities or world-models (‘poiesis’), or of norms and values, through literary texts and other media. Though literary texts are simultaneously characterized by a reference to extra-literary reality, as emphasized unanimously, albeit with a basis in different concepts, by Paul Ricœur, Wolfgang Iser and Jürgen Link and others, they never merely reflect cultural models or norms and values (cf. Kövecses 1999, 2006). Ricœur (1984 [1983]) makes clear that the creation of world-models or versions of reality through literary works rests on dynamic transformation processes – on an interaction among the “prefigura-tion” of the text, that is, its reference to the pre-existent extra-textual world (mimesis I); the textual “configuration” that creates a fictional object (mimesis II); and the “re-figuration” by the reader (mimesis III). The literary process thus appears as an active constructive process, in which cultural systems of meaning, literary processes of for-mal configuration and practices of reception are equally involved and in which reality is not merely reflected, but instead first poetically created (cf. ibid.: 107) and then “iconically enriched” (cf. 127).

To sum up: The symbolic order of the extra-literary reality, e.g. of norms and val-ues that actually exist in the real world, and the literary or possible worlds created within the medium of literature enter into a relationship of mutual influence and change. Ricœur’s “circle of mimesis” can thus contribute to a differentiation among different levels of the relationship between literature and values: First, literary works are related to extra-literary norms and values (prefiguration); second, they represent norms and values, their content and functioning, in the medium of fiction (configura-tion); and third, they can help form new norms and values (refiguration). What per-spectives are opened up through such an examination for the analysis and interpreta-tion of novels, plays and poetry as well as of other media from the point of view of a literary studies focussing on the value(s) and functions of literature?

3. The value(s) of literature: a selective overview of functions of literature

The articles in this volume proceed from the assumption that literature in general and fictional narratives in particular are of fundamental importance for the ways in which we make sense of our experiences and for how we assign meaning and values to our lives. In his pioneering account of the creation of an autobiographical self, felicitously entitled How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Paul John Eakin has shown

INTRODUCTION 7

that narratives are at work in processes such as identity formation, ordering experi-ences, remembering and negotiating values. In a similar vein, the contributions in this volume argue that literary stories are not only an important means of making autobio-graphical selves, but an equally important means of worldmaking, of making sense of our lives and of generating norms and values.

A brief overview of some of the functions that literature fulfils may therefore shed more light on the value of literature. In the first place, literature is a very complex way of worldmaking. Though the referential dimension of literary texts was not only downplayed but almost forgotten in the heyday of poststructuralism, and though litera-ture of course only refers to the ‘real’ world in a very indirect and oblique way, the value of literature resides to a considerable extent in its capacity to conjure up or gen-erate alternative or possible worlds, worldmodels (cf. A. Nünning 2009a) or ‘story-worlds’ (cf. Herman 2002). Although the relationship between the actual world we live in and the storyworld projected in a novel or play can vary considerably, the story-worlds projected by literature arguably serve as models of thought, feeling, and action, as conceptual and emotional fictions many people live by.

To identify the functions of literature entirely with those of models, however, is to miss significant cultural functions that literature has performed for centuries. In his important work on ‘literature as cultural ecology’, Hubert Zapf has developed a so-phisticated “functional theory of imaginative texts” (Zapf 2001: 85). According to his tripartite model, the complexity of which defies any attempt at summarizing it briefly, the “cultural-ecological function of literature can be described as a combination of three main procedures” (ibid.: 93). First of all, literature not only represents but also balances, lays bare, and critiques typical contradictions, deficits, and deformations dis-played by the economic, political, and social systems of a given society. By doing so literature fulfill “the function of a cultural-critical metadiscourse” (ibid.). In addition to that, literature secondly often focuses on those dimensions of the real world and of the ‘collective unconscious’ (cf. Jameson 1983 [1981]) that are marginalized, neglected or repressed in it, thus confronting society with alternative or possible storyworlds that serve to put the dominant worldmodels into perspective. Zapf’s term for this is “the function of an imaginative counter-discourse” (Zapf 2001: 93). Third, literature serves to confront that which is marginalized or repressed in a given system with the hege-monic worldview and to synthesize or reintegrate the various discourses that are usu-ally separated in society (e.g. the discourses of the systems of politics, economics, law, education etc.), thus fulfilling “the function of a reintegrative inter-discourse” (ibid.; cf. Link 1992 [1988]).

In addition to, and closely linked to, these three cultural functions, literature also fulfils important normative functions because it serves to represent, disseminate, cri-tique and generate norms and values. The relationship between the values widely ac-cepted in any given society and those projected by literary texts may again vary dra-matically. On the one hand, literature can authorize and subscribe to hegemonic values and norms, e.g. propagating ideologically charged views of colonialism or imperial-

SIBYLLE BAUMBACH, HERBERT GRABES & ANSGAR NÜNNING 8

ism, thus indeed “making imperial mentalities” (Mangan 1990). Late-Victorian fiction and poetry of empire, for instance, projected norms of behaviour associated with Vic-torian family life onto the relationship between England and her colonies, mapping the feelings, norms and values of the private sphere of the family onto the relationship be-tween England and her colonies (cf. Nünning/Rupp 2008; A. Nünning 2009b). By do-ing so, literary texts can fulfill ideological and even propagandistic functions, serving as a means of nurturing the culture’s dominant fictions.

On the other hand, however, literature can fulfil a critical function vis-à-vis the norms and values generally accepted by the majority of society. Instead of supporting dominant ideological fictions and those culturally sanctioned systems of ideas, beliefs, presuppositions, and convictions which constitute hegemonic mentalities, literature tends to critique the prevailing norms, values, clichés, and discourses of power, con-fronting them with alternative systems of thought and hierarchies of values. There are good reasons why literary texts are more efficient in this respect than other texts: one is that they ‘teach by example’ only. This indirect way of presenting criticism or alter-natives is much better suited to overcoming ingrained opinions. The other reason lies in the fact that whatever they present is, at least prima facie, both offered and received as merely invented, and is therefore much better protected from censorship.

Either way, literature can be central to the formation of collective identities and “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) for the simple reason that not only a nation but “any imagined community is held together by the stories it generates about itself” (Arata 1996: 1). While the characters, stories and values projected by Victorian fic-tions of empire were, for instance, instrumental in what one might call the imaginative forging of the British Empire (cf. Nünning/Nünning 1996), by far the greater part of the literature since modernism, though not overtly supporting hegemonic ideologies, has still served as an important means of forging or re-negotiating Britain’s national identity, something which is neither natural nor stable, but discursively constructed. In doing so, literature has always served to disseminate, popularize and construct norms and values, providing agreed-upon codes of understanding society and cultural tradi-tions, of looking at the world and the nation.

Working simultaneously on different cognitive, emotional, normative, and ideo-logical levels, literary fictions can be seen as a productive medium that has played a creative role in generating norms and values. Shaping habits of thought, popular feel-ing, as well as views of the present and past, literature has played an important part in the making of mentalities and world views. By projecting configurations and hierar-chies of values, literature has not only served to organize the conceptual and emotional codes people live by, but, more often than not, also to challenge these codes.

INTRODUCTION 9

4. Conclusion: on the structure of the volume and overview of the articles

Approaching the topic of “Literature and Values” from various angles, as it does, the present volume may give a better idea of how ethical values are disseminated through-out a culture via literature and other media – certainly in more distinct and perhaps more efficient ways than through direct proselytizing. As the essays are to be consid-ered as variations on a common theme, there will inevitably be some degree of over-lap. Nevertheless, an attempt has been made to distinguish between those articles in which the reader is likely to find general theoretical insights, models, and tenets, often supported by historical examples, and those essays in which closer examination of one or more historical and literary examples has led to theoretical conclusions.

The articles in the first section focus on theories and concepts of values, while also exploring the relationship between literature and values. To what extent do the moral and the aesthetic influence each other and where do ethics and aesthetics, which have often been regarded as opposites, intersect? Taking these questions as a starting point, the essays in this section further investigate the ethical dimension of the aesthetic ex-perience of reading literary texts. Lothar Bredella stresses the role of empathy, sympa-thy, and pity as well as the ability to recognise, judge, and evaluate these feelings for the dissemination of values through literature: It is first and foremost our ability to put ourselves into the position of others which makes literature valuable for intercultural communication and understanding and which allows the cross-cultural communication of moral concepts via literary texts. The emotional response to the text and thus the aesthetic-ethical experience is intensified by the dominance of the particular in litera-ture. Reverting to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Herbert Grabes explains how the focus on specific characters, places, and individual fates helps create an imaginary ais-thesis, or sense perception, in the reader’s mind and in this way heightens attention to particular detail and strengthens the habit of first looking closely at “what exactly is the case” before passing judgement. Quite apart from any propagation of particular values, literature, by its demand for and development of a close and slowed down reading that takes note of every detail, therefore contributes in any case to the devel-opment of a habit that forms an indispensable condition for a fair evaluation and an enhancement of justice.

Values are established in a dynamic dialogue between reader and text, which in-volves empathy and the ability to reflect on one’s emotional response. Intuitive and sensual reactions therefore have to be taken into account when assessing the ethical dimension of literature. Pure reasoning, however, would be insufficient as literature, unlike science, often does not follow the rules of pure logic. Nor does its specific ef-fect derive from explicit ethical values but its ‘value’, as well as the value of all art, lies in what Ronald Shusterman refers to as a “metaethical dimension”, which involves the evaluation, interpretation, and judgement by the reader. It is a characteristic of “complex literature” (Angela Locatelli) that it calls both on emotions and the intellect,

INTRODUCTION 11

making errors: The interpretation of another person and another life embraces the po-tentiality of misinterpretation and it is this experience of ‘strangeness’ and alterity which characterises the ethical dimension of complex literature. Misreadings seem to be precluded, however, whenever we are confronted with literary characters that are pushed to their existential limits in torture or in humiliation. These situations seem to evoke a return to and reflection of intrinsic (in the Kantian sense) values, which can be regarded as transcendental or as parts of a shared value system which regulates our being-in-the-world, and whose applicability is reflected in numerous modern narra-tives and becomes seminal in de Kretser’s and Coetzee’s novels (Philipp Wolf). The neglect of these intrinsic values in times of war, in violent oppression and torture causes traumatic experiences which have become a key theme in contemporary fiction (Susana Onega). The Holocaust, the Vietnam War as well as the two World Wars have become frequent topics of twentieth-century novels, a fact which underlines the ethical dimension of literature and furthermore shifts the focus to the function of memory in the discourse on norms and values.

Considering that a certain spatial and temporal distance is indispensable for ade-quately evaluating the actions and lives of others, the literary memoir seems a particu-larly apt genre for investigating the intersection of the aesthetic and ethical dimension of literary texts while, at the same time, foregrounding the responsibility of the author in the process of life-writing and literary worldmaking (Katarzyna Kuczma). The au-thor’s task thereby is less to explicitly state ethical issues or weave allegorical plots but – as Roger D. Sell argues referring to the poetry of William Wordsworth – the dis-semination of values rests on the art of ‘genuine communication’, a communication which is uncoercive and timeless insofar as it is not only addressed to readers of a spe-cific era but embraces qualities of a universal language which continues to attract peo-ple of different eras and cultures. Poetry appears as a popular and effective medium not only for the communication but also for the construction of imperial, religious and political values. Thus, as Birgit Neumann’s article shows, in eighteenth-century Brit-ain, for instance, a whole net of imperial poetry can be identified which was highly charged with political and moral values and served to promote and consolidate the greatness of the empire.

As all the case studies indicate, the value-discourse in literature promotes a dia-logue with past, present, and future notions of ethics and aesthetics – notions which are revived, reconsidered, and sometimes revised in literary worldmaking. This dialogue is prompted in literature, for instance, in the literary subgenre of ‘dialogues of the dead’ (Sibylle Baumbach), which provides a trans-temporal and cross-cultural space for the discussion of norms and values; most frequently, however, it is conducted in the form of “genuine communication” which combines the ethical and the aesthetic in the ex-perience of reading.

Literature, however, is but one effective vehicle for the formation and dissemina-tion of values: In the global and multimedia village, digital media play a seminal role in our daily lives, providing alternative worlds and experiments that illustrate how to

SIBYLLE BAUMBACH, HERBERT GRABES & ANSGAR NÜNNING 12

do things with norms and values. As Kirsten Pohl argues, computer games use very specific narrative strategies to promote and simulate behavioural rules, actions and ethical judgements, some of which raise the question of the moral boundaries of com-puter simulation. The breaking of certain ethical norms in the digital or in the real world does not, however, necessarily undermine society’s value system: It may as well necessitate a re-negotiation of existent values which ultimately serves their stabilisa-tion. Sonja Altnöder and Martin Zierold present an argument for the usefulness of me-dia scandals and social mechanisms which arise from a blatant violation of prevailing values and for that very reason are likely to provoke a discussion and re-evaluation of social norms and even a reconciliation of conflicting sets of values in society.

Providing new perspectives on the relationship between literature and value(s), the articles in this volume not only explore historical changes and developments in the assessment of the value of literature. They also attest and contribute to the ongoing dialogue between, and interdependence of, the extra-literary world and the possible worlds of literature in prefiguring, manifesting, and disseminating norms and values. Besides offering new insights into the relationship between values and literature, this volume aims to promote new approaches to an interdisciplinary field of research, which is still one of the most controversial and, at the same time, most fruitful and fas-cinating areas in literary and cultural studies.

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INTRODUCTION 13

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INTRODUCTION 15

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