Modernism and Morality

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.

'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 modern literature, and of how it remains.' - Michael Wood, Professor of English, Princeton University, NJ 'Halliwell builds a detailed and convincing argument for rethinking popular notions of modernism.' - Choice

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