Cirrus@Austlit

'Can, or should, literary criticism ever be entirely free of ethical judgement? And what does it mean to talk about the place of ethics in criticism? As a literary scholar with an interest in a wide range of fiction in English, and a book reviewer, I am implicitly confronted with these questions whenever I set out to write about literature in either essay or review form. Although the book review and the literary essay are different types of endeavour in many ways, this problem is common to both.' (Introduction)