Despite the powerful challenge to ethical criticism by neo-Nietzschean literary theory, there has been recently what Martha Nussbaum has called ‘a marked turn toward the ethical’. The ‘turn’ has been evident even at the centre of deconstruction in the work of Derrida himself – for example, his address to the American Philosophical Association in 1988 on the topic of Aristotle's theory of friendship. Nussbaum also adduces Barbara Johnson's A World of Difference, which argues for the ethical and social relevance of Deconstruction. She might have added J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading, though Miller's conception of the ethical is much thinner and less satisfactory than Johnson's, being confined to the act of reading itself. Nussbaum concludes: ‘No doubt part of this change can be traced to the scandal over the political career of Paul de Man, which has made theorists anxious to demonstrate that Deconstruction does not imply a neglect of ethical and social considerations.’

There may be more than a grain of truth in this observation, but it would be a pity if it were accepted as the whole explanation of a change that has wider and deeper implications. For this recent ‘turn toward the ethical’ reaches across a much more varied body of work than Nussbaum suggests. If we exclude those who have laboured fruitfully, but unfashionably, in this particular area for many years, notably the distinguished Australian critic S. L. Goldberg (to whom I am indebted), there has been a profusion of work, especially in the United States, that looks very much like the beginnings of a significant resurgence in ethical criticism.