Modernism and Morality

MARTIN HALLIWELL is a Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Romantic Science at the Experience of Self.

Modernism and Morality discusses the relationship between artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism.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.