The handbook will be the first of its kind worldwide - and in contrast to, and clearly delimited from, The Routledge Companion to Ethics (ed. J. Skorupski) und The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (ed. R. Crisp) - systematically investigates which contribution literature makes to ethics in its own way. We, therefore, speak of Literary Ethics and base the handbook on the premise that literature itself is a philosophical-ethical category.