Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism

Establishing a new theoretical foothold at the crossroads of human, nonhuman, and posthuman studies in literary modernism, Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism broadens our current understanding of modernist ethics. Analysing a wide range of poetry, drama, prose fiction, and non-fiction writing, these essays expand the vertical and horizontal boundaries of modernist studies while addressing a number of the thematic concerns and critical approaches that are currently at the vanguard of modernist studies. These provocations, produced by both established critics and emerging scholars, include interrogations of the ethics of collaboration and influence through the lenses of queer theory, feminism, and ecocriticism, among others. The wide ranging geographical and interdisciplinary scope of this collection, which includes fields such as law and literature and animal studies, refreshes and reconfigures past debates on the positive influence and ethical failures of modernist literature for a new generation of researchers and students. This edited collection is the first book length study to use such an expansive and cutting-edge definition of modernist ethics and acts as both the definitive introduction to the topic and offers a series of original and ground-breaking essays.

Table of Contents

Introduction | Katherine Ebury, Bridget English and Matthew Fogarty

Section 1: The Ethics of Mind and Body
1. An Béal Bocht and the Ethics of the Modernist Laughing Apocalypse | Paul Fagan
2. Grey Men Bent Like Hooks: The Ethics of Representing Older Age in Djuna Barnes’s Early Journalism and Late Interviews | Jade French
3. The Solar Plexus and Animalistic Power in D. H. Lawrence and Isadora Duncan | Carrie Rohman

Section 2: Planetary Ethics
4. Reparative Ethics, or The Case of Anna D. Whyte | Marian Eide
5. Interrogating the Ethics of Cosmopolitanism in Stella Benson’s Travel Writing | Shinjini Chattopadhyay
6. Wittgenstein’s Modernism: Apocalypse and Ethics | Ben Ware

Section 3: Legal Ethics
7. Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: Ethics and the Reader | Kieran Dolin
8. What’s Love Got To Do With It? Law and Literature in 1920s British Somaliland | Katherine Isobel Baxter
9. Modern Tort Law and Anthony Powell’s A Dance Through The Music Of Time | Mimi Lu

Section 4: Intersectional Ethics
10. “Criteria of Negro Art”: Ethical Negotiations in the Harlem Renaissance | Laura Ryan
11. “And This Is How ‘The Feminists’ Are Made”: Ethical Collaboration Between Eleonora Duse and Gabriele D’Annunzio | Zsuzsanna Balázs
12. Reading James Joyce in the Wake of the #MeToo Movement | Julie McCormick Weng