Transatlantic modernism : moral dilemmas in modernist fiction
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Transatlantic modernism : moral dilemmas in modernist fiction
Edinburgh University Press, 2006
- : pbk
- Other Title
-
Modernism and morality
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
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.
by "Nielsen BookData"