Literature cultivates 'deep selves' for whom books matter because they take over from religion fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. This volume embraces and questions this perspective, whilst also developing a 'new humanist' critical vocabulary which specifies, and therefore opens to debate, the human significance of literature.

'This book stands out as an intervention in post-poststructuralist debates, alongside the 'new aesthetics', 'singularities', the 'new ethics', and other efforts to formulate the critical trajectories of the new millennium, and will have a significant impact on the way literary studies will shape its theoretical debates in the near future.' - Tim Woods, Professor in English and American Studies, Aberystwyth University, UK

Autorentext
ANDY MOUSLEY is Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University, UK. Recent publications include Re-Humanising Shakespeare (2007), Critical Humanisms (2003, with Martin Halliwell), and articles on humanism and posthumanism, and on autobiography, in the journals Textual Practice, Shakespeare, and postmedieval. He is series co-editor of Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature.

Inhalt
List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Towards a New Literary Humanism; A.Mousley PART I: LITERATURE AS ERSATZ THEOLOGY: DEEP SELVES Introduction; A.Mousley Faith, Feeling, Reality: Anne Brontë as an Existentialist Poet; R.Styler Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Feeling for the Human; K.Martin Being Human and being Animal in Twentieth-Century Horse-Whispering Writings: 'Word-Bound Creatures' and 'the Breath of Horses'; E.Graham Judith Butler and the Catachretic Human; I.Arteel PART II: SCEPTICISM, OR HUMANISM AT THE LIMIT Introduction; A.Mousley Shakespeare's Refusers: Humanism at the Limit; R.Chamberlain Why Eliot Killed Lydgate: 'Joyful Cruelty' in Middlemarch; S.Earnshaw Atomised: Mary Midgley and Michel Houellebecq; J.Wallace Humanity without Itself: Robert Musil, Giorgio Agamben and Posthumanism; I.Callus & S.Herbrechter PART III: LITERATURE, DEMOCRACY, HUMANISMS FROM BELOW Introduction; A.Mousley Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina; D.Arsenijevi? HUM (-an, -ane, -anity, -anities, -anism, -anise); M.Robson Humanising Marx: Theory and Fiction in the Fin de Siècle British Socialist Periodical; D.Mutch Civic Humanism: Said, Brecht and Coriolanus; N.Wood References Index