Transatlantic Modernism

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Thought and Culture at the University of Leicester. His recent books include The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health (2022) and Transformed States: Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990–2020 (2025).

• 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.

'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. -- Professor Michael Wood, Princeton University Halliwell has bravely cultivated worn-over ground and harvested a fruitful abundance of fresh reflections which reverberate in the mind of the reader long after the book has been put down. This breathless ride! is an intellectual free-wheeling sojourn through twentieth-century European and American literature. -- Professor Patrick J. M. Quinn, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Halliwell builds a detailed and convincing argument for rethinking popular notions of modernism. Of special significance is his treatment of modernism as an international reassessment of morality, a Euro-American reaction to a long-developing crisis in thinking about how humans should behave. -- P. J. Ferlazzo, Northern Arizona University, in Choice It offers an excellent introduction to the historical and theoretical issues and critical modes involved in ethical criticism, grounded in a generous range of examples. -- Professor Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London '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. Halliwell has bravely cultivated worn-over ground and harvested a fruitful abundance of fresh reflections which reverberate in the mind of the reader long after the book has been put down. This breathless ride! is an intellectual free-wheeling sojourn through twentieth-century European and American literature. Halliwell builds a detailed and convincing argument for rethinking popular notions of modernism. Of special significance is his treatment of modernism as an international reassessment of morality, a Euro-American reaction to a long-developing crisis in thinking about how humans should behave. It offers an excellent introduction to the historical and theoretical issues and critical modes involved in ethical criticism, grounded in a generous range of examples.