ABSTRACT
A unique feature of music, in contrast to the other arts, is that engaging in an exploration of moral issues by means of music is practically impossible. The lyrics of a song may deal with moral issues, certainly, but lyrics are distinct from music: lyric poetry is a form of literature found in combination with music. This chapter introduces "earthen" as an adjective to use in categorizing all literature that, like the Flashman novels, is deliberately amoral in a non-innocent, post-Edenic way. The word "earthen" also has the advantage of falling nicely into a sequence with the words "brazen" and "golden". Brazen and golden are the designations that are used for the main divisions in the taxonomy of moral literature. The works of earthen literature such as the Flashman novels lie outside the realm of moral literature altogether, but they require a modicum of attention because earthen literature is what the varieties of moral literature define themselves against.
