...Thomas Albrecht Thomas Albrecht, “‘That Free Play of Human Affection’: The Humanist Ethics of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance ” (pp. 486–521) This essay aims to refute received, persistent misconceptions of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), and of aestheticism...

... with the singular human self as such than with our standing ever amid innumerable and consequential relations and accountable for all it entails. Ultimately, this essay hopes to demonstrate how Emerson speaks, from the first, to the ethical potential of rediscovering our connections—connections to ourselves, fellow...

...Lauren Simek This essay examines the ethical and rhetorical significance that narrative knowledge holds for women’s public articulation of belief in Sarah Grand’s New Woman trilogy (1888–1897). Grand’s novels’ interest in moral and political expression has led critics, early and late, to criticize...

... and John Ruskin share. I use a discussion of consumer ethics to explore the moral logic of their conservatism by examining the role of the aesthetic within it. Economic consumption and the aesthetic are subjects inextricably connected, not just because the discourses of political economy and aesthetics...

...Elisha Cohn Elisha Cohn, "'No insignificant creature': Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn" (pp. 494–520) This essay examines the limitations of ethically motivated representations of animals in Victorian realism. As many critics have argued, evolutionary theory's challenge to human supremacy had...