Hanna Meretoja has written a much-needed book, showing how literature can expand our sense of the possible while warning against inflated claims about its moral value. Both hope and caution, she insists, are needed. Meretoja's analysis is remarkably capacious in its synthesis of literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives. Its intellectual ambitions, meanwhile, are matched by the exceptional precision and clarity of its arguments. This is essential reading
for anyone interested in the ethics of narrative."
Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Turku in Finland. Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative theory, narrative hermeneutics, and narrative ethics. She is the author of The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the co-editor of
Values of Literature (Brill, 2015) and Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts, and the Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018).