Modernism and Morality Ethical Devices in European and American Fiction

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.

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