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.