Recognition and Ethics in World Literature is a critical comparative study of contemporary
world literature focused on the importance of the ethical turn (or return) in literary theory.
It considers the shape and development of the ethical engagement of the novels of Amitav Ghosh
Chimamanda Adichie Caryl Phillips Kazuo Ishiguro Zadie Smith and JM Coetzee exploring the
overlaps and divergences between Levinasian Derridean and Aristotelian ethics as they are
brought to bear on literature. The characters' recognitions and emotional responses in these
texts are integral to the unfolding of their ethical concerns and the ethics thus explored is
often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic. A view of recognition
is advanced that shifts it from the more usual political understanding in the field towards
seeing it as a formal device used to unfold an ethical knowledge peculiar to fictional
narrative and particularly suitable for the concerns of world literature authors in its
interconnection of the universal and the particular-a binary that has been crucial in
postcolonialism and remains important for the wider field of world literature. The analysis
unfolds with a focus on three broad ethical themes-religion the memory of violence and the
human-eliciting the novelists' contributions to these debates through the investigation of the
functioning of moments of recognition in their novels.
