Searching for Eden : John Steinbeck's Ethical Career

Bibliographic Information

Searching for Eden : John Steinbeck's Ethical Career

John H. Timmerman

Mercer University Press, 2014

  • : hbk

Available at  / 4 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Contents of Works

  • Ethics and actions
  • The early ethics
  • The Grapes of Wrath: the emergence of an ethics
  • My people are no people
  • Heart of Darkness, Light of Heaven
  • A Knight's Tale
  • The dignity of humanity

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Ethics for Steinbeck always entailed justice. This didn’t change over the course of his long career. Justice is constituted of a communal spirit, a relational situation in which individual humans care for their fellows, and a state that champions the cause of the needy and outcast. Any violation merits punishment if incurred by an individual or rebellion if incurred by the state. Upon such points as these most Steinbeck readers agree. What hasn’t been done before, however, and what Searching For Eden undertakes, is a careful analysis of how these ideas fluctuated at different points during Steinbeck’s literary career. Of utmost importance here are the latter years of Steinbeck’s life when his deepening political involvement and immersion in Arthurian myth shaped a changing ethic altogether.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

Page Top