Transatlantic modernism : moral dilemmas in modernist fiction

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Bibliographic Information

Transatlantic modernism : moral dilemmas in modernist fiction

Martin Halliwell

Edinburgh University Press, 2006

  • : pbk

Other Title

Modernism and morality

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Note

"First published by Palgrave 2001, as Modernism and morality. This paperback edition 2006"--T.p. verso

Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-256) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Transatlantic Modernism traces the intersection of artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism. Rather than reading modernism as a complete rejection of social morality, this perceptive study shows how early twentieth-century writers such as Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, Kafka, Mann and Stein devised new aesthetic techniques to address ethical problems. By focusing on a range of decadent, naturalist, avant-garde and expatriate writers between the 1890s and 1940s, this book reassesses the moral trajectory of fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. The book is divided into four parts - Part I deals with Decadence and Naturalism, Part II with Symbolic Centres of Modernism, Part III with Sexual and Cultural Difference, and Part IV with Modernist Trickery - to discuss how modernist writers forged creative, but sometimes dangerous, links between personal and social morality. The chapters alternate between considering broad literary trends, such as the European avant-garde, American writers in Paris and the modernist picaresque, and the close study of influential texts, includingThe Immoralist, Death in Venice, The Secret Agent, The Sound and the Fury, Amerika and Mephisto. In response to the recent emergence of ethical theory in the humanities and the shifting parameters of national morality in the early twentieth-first century, Halliwell's book provides a fresh and timely analysis of the ways in which transatlantic modernists used fiction as a testing-ground for moral possibility. This new paperback edition contains an updated conclusion which explores modernist continuities in the early twenty-first century, literary responses to September 11 and the shifting parameters of national morality. Key Features: * Offers a fresh look at American and European Modernism * Discusses a wide range of important Modernist writers and texts including Wilde, Wharton, Conrad, Faulkner, Stein, Hemmingway, Kafka, Roth and Mann * Explores the role of ethics in literature in new and innovative ways * Introduces the historical and theoretical issues involved in ethical criticism using a broad range of examples

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Modernity and the Crisis of Morals
  • Part I: Naturalism and Decadence
  • 1. Decadence, Naturalism and the Morality of Writing (Huysmans, Wilde, Norris, Wharton)
  • 2. Books and Ruins: Abject Decadence in Gide and Mann
  • Part II: Symbolic Centres of Modernism
  • 3. Extremist Modernism: The Avant-Garde and the Limits of Art (Tzara, Huelsenback, Breton, Aragon)
  • 4. Moral Regeneration and Moral Bankruptcy: Conrad, Faulkner and Idiocy
  • Part III: Sexual and Cultural Difference
  • 5. American Expatriate Fictions and the Ethics of Sexual Difference (Stein, Hemmingway, Miller, Nin)
  • 6. The Blind Impress of Modernity: Lorca, Kafka and New York
  • Part IV: Modernist Trajectory
  • 7. The Modernist Picaresque: Moralists without Qualities (Musil, Hesse, Hurston, Roth)
  • 8. Myths of the Magician: Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann and Germany
  • Conclusion: Liberating the Fear of Modernity.

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