Title: Moral Certainties and the Problem of Determinism: The Example of the Literature of Cowardice
Abstract:The existence in the twentieth century of a number of plays, novels and short stories about cowardice has the advantage of providing specific examples of just how fully the ethical standards of one ag...The existence in the twentieth century of a number of plays, novels and short stories about cowardice has the advantage of providing specific examples of just how fully the ethical standards of one age can differ from those of another. Although no culture has treated cowardice as a virtue, it is rare before the nineteenth century to find it presented with the same horror which leads Thomas Hughes to describe the hero of Tom Brown's Schooldays, in 1857, as seeing it as 'the incarnation of all sins'. In the twentieth century, the attitude of agnostic or atheistic writers as different from one another in other ways as Sartre, Somerset Maugham, Brecht and Ernest Hemingway did nothing to attenuate the condemnation already there in the empire-building, muscular Christianity of Hughes. If there are excuses for cowardice, they are mentioned by twentieth-century writers only in order to be dismissed.Read More
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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