Modernism and Morality Ethical Devices in European and American Fiction

by Halliwell, Martin

• ISBN13: 9780333918845
• ISBN10: 0333918843
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-11-17
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Modernism and Morality discusses the relationship between artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism. Rather than reading modernism as a complete rejection of social morality, this study shows how early 19th-century writers like Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, Kafka, Mann, and Stein actually devised new aesthetic techniques to address ethical problems. By focusing on a range of decadent, naturalist, avant-garde, and expatriate writers between 1890 and the late 1930s, this book reassesses the moral trajectory of transatlantic fiction.

Author Biography

Martin Halliwell is Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Leicester.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Introduction: Modernity and the Crisis of Morals	1	(28)
Part I Naturalism and Decadence
Decadence, Naturalism and the Morality of Writing (Huysmans, Wilde, Norris, Wharton)	29	(20)
Books and Ruins: Abject Decadence in Gide and Mann	49	(20)
Part II Symbolic Centres of Modernism
Extremist Modernism: The Avant-Garde and the Limits of Art (Tzara, Huelsenbeck, Breton, Aragon)	69	(19)
Moral Regeneration and Moral Bankruptcy: Conrad, Faulkner and Idiocy	88	(23)
Part III Sexual and Cultural Difference
American Expatriate Fictions and the Ethics of Sexual Difference (Stein, Hemingway, Miller, Nin)	111	(22)
The Blind Impress of Modernity: Lorca, Kafka and New York	133	(24)
Part IV Modernisty Trickery
The Modernist Picaresque: Moralists without Qualities (Musil, Hesse, Hurston, Roth)	157	(22)
Myths of the Magician: Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann and Nazi Germany	179	(17)
Conclusion: Liberating the Fear of Modernity	196	(14)
Notes	210	(30)
Bibliography	240	(17)
Index	257