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 collection reappraises and retheorizes Marie Corelli’s diverse fictional writings and locates them in their contemporary literary and social context. Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was a fabulously popular novelist in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Yet, in her day, critics railed against her taste for sentimentality, melodrama, supernatural worlds, and overt didacticism. Many critics are still ambivalent about her writing. However, in their reappraisal, the contributors to this volume largely circumvent the earlier critics and engage afresh with Corelli’s writing strategies; genre choices; representations of social issues; and ideas about science, metaphysics, and morality. Moving beyond the now outdated project of "recovery", the volume also discusses Corelli’s literary market place, analysing both her publishing successes and her decline in popularity. An important theme throughout is Corelli’s troubled relationship with an emerging literary Modernism and an ever-widening gulf between high and popular culture. The contributors interrogate the critical templates, assumptions, and biases of a literary establishment (past and present) centred on Modernist tropes and structures. As a result, the Corelli they unearth is not a defective Modernist but an innovative and original writer who eschewed the dictates of a movement with which she had no empathy. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

What was the ethical perspective of modernist literature? How did Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett represent ethical issues and develop their moral ideas? Lee Oser argues that thinking about human nature restores a perspective on modernist literature that has been lost. He offers detailed discussions of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics to illuminate close readings of major modernist texts. For Oser, the reception of Aristotle is crucial to the modernist moral project, which he defines as the effort to transform human nature through the use of art. Exploring the origins of that project, its success in modernism, its critical heirs, and its possible future, The Ethics of Modernism brings a fresh perspective on modernist literature and its interaction with ethical strands of philosophy. It offers many new insights to scholars of twentieth-century literature as well as intellectual historians.

This book incorporates many of the exciting debates in the social sciences and philosophy of knowledge concerning the issues of modernity and post-modernism. It sets out a new project for criminology, a criminology of modernity, and offers a sustained critique of theorizing without a concern for social totalities. This book is designed to place criminological theory at the cutting edge of contemporary debates. Wayne Morrison reviews the history and present state of criminology and identifies a range of social problems and large scale social processes which must be addressed if the subject is to attain intellectual commitment. This book marks a new development in criminological texts and will serve a valuable function not only for students and academics but for all those interested in the project of understanding crime in contemporary conditions.

Radio Modernism marries the fields of radio studies and modernist cultural historiography to the recent 'ethical turn' in literary and cultural studies to examine how representative British writers negotiated the moral imperative for public service broadcasting that was crafted, embraced, and implemented by the BBC's founders and early administrators. Weaving together the institutional history of the BBC and developments in ethical philosophy as mediated and forged by writers such as T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, Todd Avery shows how these and other prominent authors' involvement with radio helped to shape the ethical contours of literary modernism. In so doing, Avery demonstrates the central role radio played in the early dissemination of modernist art and literature, and also challenges the conventional assertion that modernists were generally elitist and anti-democratic. Intended for readers interested in the fields of media and cultural studies and modernist historiography, this book is remarkable in recapturing for a twenty-first-century audience the interest, fascination, excitement, and often consternation that British radio induced in its literary listeners following its inception in 1922.

Friedrich Nietzsche believed his own work represented the dawning of a new historical era, and, despite the fact that he lived most of his sane life suffering in obscurity, it is not an exaggeration to say that his vision helped lay the foundations for modernism in style, substance and attitude. Nietzsche was himself devoted to the modern, for he reinterpreted every philosophy, every historical figure and event, every movement that came before him. This reconceptualization of the past through new, modern eyes opened up Nietzsche's thinking to exploring daring possibilities for the future. This prophetic boldness, which is so unique to his style, seduced the modernist generation across the spectrum. He was read by early Zionists as well as by Nazi racial theorists; by Thomas Mann and as well as by Salvador Dali. His influence stretched from psychoanalysis to anarchist politics. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism traces the effect of Nietzsche's thinking upon a diverse set of problems: from ontology, to politics, to musical and literary aesthetics. The first section of the volume is a series of essays, each exploring a major work of Nietzsche's, explaining its significance while contributing new interpretations of the text. The middle portion connects Nietzsche's thought to the various strands of modernism in which it reveals itself. The final section is a glossary of key terms that Nietzsche uses throughout his works. An excellent resource for any scholar attempting to conceptualize the foundations of modernism or the historical importance of Nietzsche, this volume seeks to outline the philosopher's works and their reception amongst the generations that immediately followed his passing.

Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things offers an original interpretation and vigorous defense of Theodor Adorno’s idea of philosophy as the practice of what Roger Foster calls “philosophical modernism.” Adorno’s philosophical writings, from the early 1930s to the mature works of the late 1960s, are deeply informed by a distinctively modernist vision of human experience. This book seeks to establish that Adorno’s unique and lasting contribution to philosophy consists in his sustained and rigorous development of this modernist vision into an encompassing practice of philosophical interpretation. The essential features of this vision can be discerned in all of Adorno’s major writings in philosophy, social theory, and aesthetics. Its defining element is the idea of a pattern underlying ordinary experience, which, although not directly accessible, can be disclosed by the reconstructive work of philosophical or literary language. This vision, Foster argues, can be discerned in the major works of literary modernism (including Woolf, Proust, and Musil) as well as in the interpretive technique of psychoanalysis developed by Sigmund Freud. The importance of Adorno’s contribution to twentieth-century philosophy can only be fully appreciated by understanding how he developed this vision into an overarching practice of philosophical interpretation that furnished a coherent and profound response to the decay of experience afflicting late-modern societies. In this book, Foster expounds that interpretive practice, exploring its ramifications and, in particular, its relation with literary modernism, and places it in critical dialogue with alternative philosophical responses.

This volume is a passionate scholarly inquiry focused on some of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary architectural practice, urbanism, and city-making. Presented in the form of conversations with leading architects, urbanists, and internationally renowned architectural historians and urban thinkers, this concise book reviews and critiques the legacy of Modernism and its impact on global urbanisation. Timely, thoughtful and thought-provoking, these conversations, conducted by the editor during the last few years, urge the rejection of some of the most widespread dogmas and often dangerously limiting and misguided intellectual legacies of urban and architectural thinking. The contributors recommend a search instead for more enlightened architectural practices, urban planning, and city-making in the new millennium, when environmental problems have become particularly pressing. In this volume, readers will find not only glimpses into possible urban futures, but a thorough review of what now often appear as the shackles of the not-so-distant Modernist past.

An engagement with the continued importance of modernism is vital for building a nuanced account of the development of the novel after 1945. Bringing together internationally distinguished scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, these essays reveal how the most innovative writers working today draw on the legacies of modernist literature. Dynamics of influence and adaptation are traced in dialogues between authors from across the twentieth century: Lawrence and A. S. Byatt, Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, Forster and Zadie Smith. The book sets out new critical and disciplinary foundations for rethinking the very terms we use to map the novel's progression and renewal, enhancing our understanding not only of what modernism was but also what it might still become. With its global reach, The Legacies of Modernism will appeal to scholars working not only in the new modernist studies, but also in postcolonial studies and comparative literature.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.