Literary Justice: The Participatory Ethics of Early Modern Possible Worlds

Abstract

Where early modern writers traffic in imaginative inventions, they often do so with the aim of effecting positive change. In this chapter, Debapriya Sarkar puts pressure on the ethical relation between literature’s celebration of possible worlds and the pedagogical value of such imagined realms for the reader—and, by extension, for the student of early modern literature and culture. She shows how we might tap into the ubiquitous presence of imaginary worlds in early modern literature; these “golden” worlds of the imagination simultaneously practice and theorize ways of knowing and being in the actual world. What Sarkar calls “participatory readerly ethics” reveals “the radical potential of poiesis” to help us transform what is into what might be.