The Ethics of Nonfiction: Rhetoric, Ethos, and Identity

This book explores issues of identity, ethics and epistemology that arise around the writing and reception of creative nonfiction. It examines a range of different nonfiction forms – including the personal essay and memoir – and ethical questions that arise in relation to them, such as truth claims, the confessional mode, counter-narratives. Drawing on the ideas of Bakhtin, Nietzsche and Foucault; examples from creative non-fiction writers such as Strayed and Knausgaard; and the founding principles of the originators of the genre, Seneca, Augustine and Montaigne, George Jensen argues that a limited conception of nonfiction leads to a limited view of its ethics. Writing about the truth in an authentic way is more important than ever before – and essential to this is the creation of the ethical subject.