Towards a New Literary Humanism

This ground-breaking book critically reinvigorates the tradition of asking literature to speak to the question of what it is to be human. It demonstrates how literature can expand and challenge us emotionally, cognitively and ethically, and how a literary education contributes to the cultivation of 'deep selves', where 'deep' means (amongst other things): self-aware, sensitive to emotional complexity, and concerned with fundamental questions about life. The Introduction re-conceptualises the past and present meaning of humanism within literary studies, and outlines a critical vocabulary which identifies the nature of literature's human appeal and significance. Engaging with sceptical, posthumanist perspectives, the essays themselves demonstrate how the new literary humanism and posthumanism work in practice, across a bracing range of writers and genres, including Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Anne Bronte, nineteenth-century socialist fiction, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf, Jo Shapcott, Michel Houellebecq, twentieth-century horse-whispering narratives, and contemporary poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina.