The Eudaimonic Turn Well-Being in Literary Studies [Paperback]

The Eudaimonic Turn represents nothing less than a stunning interdisciplinary achievement. The editors were well partnered... Together, their work demonstrates enormous self-awareness and intellectual humility by simultaneously developing an important new idea in the specifi c discipline of literary studies (an important contribution in its own right) while contextualising it in a much bigger global change process which has never before been so compellingly articulated. Indeed, the legacy of this work is likely to be of historic proportions.... Ultimately, The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-Being in Literary Studies is destined to be a foundational text, first for its contribution to literary studies, but even more so for recognising and articulating the contours of a broader civilisation wide development.This book is a collection of critical essays that examine a radical shift in focus and orientation. In the challenge to the hermeneutics of suspicion, the adoption of alternative reading strategies, and the investigation of well-being, this collection is an analogue of a new discourse that has immensely enriched literary studies in the last decade.?In much of the critical discourse of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, scholars employed suspicion in order to reveal a given texts complicity with various undesirable ideologies and/or psychopathologies. ?Construed as such, interpretive practice was often intended to demystify texts and authors by demonstrating in them the presence of false consciousness, bourgeois values, patriarchy, orientalism, heterosexism, imperialist attitudes, and/or various neuroses, complexes, and lacks. ?While it proved to be of vital importance in literary studies, suspicious hermeneutics often compelled scholars to interpret eudaimonia, or well-being variously conceived, in pathologized terms. At the end of the twentieth century, however, literary scholars began to see the limitations of suspicion, conceived primarily as the discernment of latelS'