Modernism and Morality Ethical Devices in European and American Fiction [Hardcover]

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 twentieth-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.Acknowledgements Introduction: Modernity and the Crisis of Morals PART I: NATURALISM AND DECADENCE Decadence, Naturalism and the Morality of Writing (Huysmans, Wilde, Norris, Wharton) Books and Ruins: Abject Decadence in Gide and Mann PART II: SYMBOLIC CENTRES OF MODERISM Extremist Modernism: The Avant-Garde and the Limits of Art (Tzara, Huelsenbeck, Breton, Aragon) Moral Regeneration and Moral Bankruptcy: Conrad, Faulkner and Idiocy PART III: SEXUAL AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE American Expatriate Fictions and the Ethics of Sexual Difference (Stein, Hemingway, Miller, Nin) The Blind Impress of Modernity: Lorca, Kafka and New York PART IV: MODERNIST TRICKERY The Modernist Picaresque: Moralists without Qualities (Musil, Hesse, Hurston, Roth) Myths of the Magician: Klaus and Thomas Mann in Nazi Germany Conclusion: Liberating the Fear of Modernity Endnotes Bibliography Index

'This lucid and always intelligent book offers what scarcely seems possible at this date: a fresh look at modernism. Modernism in Halliwell's view is a genuinely international and multifarious occasion; an intricate reaction to a long crisis in morality. Old ethical systems collapsed, as we have often been told, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. What Halliwell shows us in subtle detail is that certain crucial ethical issues, old and new, 'just will not go away'. This is a study of what remains of ethics in mol³¾