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Sets out the book's concerns with moral purpose, personal identity, and objective truth. These concerns arise out of a social context of postmodernity and moral relativism. Moral purpose, the chapter argues, derives from ultimate concern.

We argue in this chapter that moral development and identity formation are not disjunctive topics, and that morality and identity ramify in the personal formation of emerging adults in ways that have dispositional implications for how the rest of their lives go. Moral self-identity is crucial to living a life of purpose and for setting one’s life projects on a pathway that contributes to well-being, generativity, and integrity. We first review research on the role of moral purpose in personality development and the conditions that encourage it. We then review the major ways that self-identity has been conceptualized in terms of statuses, processes, and narratives, with particular emphasis on the achievement of identity maturity and its contribution to successful adaptation. We then discuss moral self-identity more directly and outline gaps in the literature and possible lines of future research.

Darwin constructed his conception of natural selection over a long period of time, not in the very instant when he read Malthus. Most scholars assume that Darwin formulated his principle of natural selection as a mechanical device, one that evacuated nature of moral purpose and derailed any teleological trajectory. This chapter argues, on the contrary, Darwin constructed natural selection to produce a progressive development of nature, a nature that had human beings as the goal of her strivings. This conclusion is reached by examining the language of Darwin’s theory. One appendix to this chapter shows the dependence of Darwin’s two arguments, for common descent and for natural selection, on one another; they are not logically independent, as some scholars have maintained. The second appendix explores the ontological character of Darwin’s “long argument.”

This chapter discusses serialized translated novels. The Arabic novel made its own proper entry into the Arabic print sphere at this moment as a part of the uncertain reform project of print culture. Novels were published after and alongside a larger body of serialized translated novels that in fact occupied the greater part of the new audience's leisure reading habits. Over the course of the first decades of commercial print from the late 1850s to the late 1870s, serialized translated novels appeared in almost every type of Arabic periodical; for many readers, the word “novel” itself probably referred to these works and not the few original ones produced to compete with them. It was not just news translation that was central to the development of Arabic print culture; the translated novel, which appeared first and most prominently in serialized form, was often identified as part of periodicals' reform projects. At the same time that editors embraced translated fiction as a vehicle for their messages, however, their claim that these works served serious moral purposes was by no means indisputable. These novels' excesses were not always containable by the moral intentions of journal editors, who sometimes resorted to qualifications and elaborate interpretations in order to justify their publication. Print's civilizing reform mission, as uncertain as it was, had a primary object: the modern reading subject. Transforming the public into a reading public, and one that read properly, was the goal of many magazine producers who outlined ideal reading practices and modeled them through novels. And it was likewise a goal with an uncertain outcome.

This chapter provides an overview of Penelope Fitzgerald’s life and writing career, showing how her literary sensibility was shaped in different ways by her intellectual and artistic education, her early family life, her career as a teacher and her philosophical and religious beliefs. In answer to the question, ‘How does she do it?’, the chapter suggests that Fitzgerald achieves ‘the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning’ through a distinctive combination of wit, literary compression, and moral purpose. The chapter also touches on Fitzgerald’s place among British and European writers of shorter fiction. It explains the structure of the book, and justifies its method of analysis: namely, the application of Fitzgerald’s critical judgments about other writers to her own work.