Professor Goldberg offers a reading of King Lear that avoids the pitfall alternatives of idealism, moralism, absurdism, and redemptionist sentimentality. He sees the play as a challenge to our moral sense and our need for a feeling of natural justice, but as undercutting all easy answers. That it does not permit them is one of its main points. The essay traces a developing response to the whole of the action as it proceeds, making no premature judgments. It springs from a considered sense of what a poetic drama is and how it works: especially how it presents 'character' and how the views of...

Agents and Lives offers a new and important rethinking of the traditional "humanist" view of literature. That tradition's valuation of literature for its "moral import" is extended in a wider, more complex, open and exploratory understanding of those terms. Goldberg's argument ranges across literature since the Renaissance, focusing on examples from George Eliot's novels and Pope's poetry. An appendix assesses the relationship of his argument to recent accounts of literature offered by moral philosophers such as Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty.

Agents and Lives offers a new and important rethinking of the traditional "humanist" view of literature. That tradition's valuation of literature for its "moral import" is extended in a wider, more complex, open and exploratory understanding of those terms. Goldberg's argument ranges across literature since the Renaissance, focusing on examples from George Eliot's novels and Pope's poetry. An appendix assesses the relationship of his argument to recent accounts of literature offered by moral philosophers such as Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty.

Australian Cultural History is a 1988 text which opens up new ways of looking at Australian society, culture and history.