Literature & Ethics

• Autor(a) principal: Morais, Ana Paiva
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/rual.v0i6.3073

This article aims to provide an insight into ethics and literature. A reading of Horace’s notions of prodesse and delectare in several literary works will enable us to question whether they still apply to contemporary works. Focusing on a corpus ranging from saints’ lives to the contemporary novel, and using mostly concepts such as example and model, we aim to provide a brief perspective on how ethics works in literary texts from a comparative and a diacronic standpoint. We argue that the problem has been inverted in contemporary fiction and that instead of moral rules nourishing fiction it is the dramatic enactment of ethics within the text that provides the narrative tools which will form the experiences allowing us to give meaning and value to the world we live in.