This exciting volume in the Transitions series explores both history and contemporary ideas, pushing forward the boundaries of what we understand by 'modernity'. This book is distinguished from its competitors by its clear focus on close readings of commonly-studied texts and a strict policy on writing for an undergraduate readership.

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.

Modernism is commonly perceived as a response to the cataclysmic events of the early twentieth century. To what extent then can we explain its continued persistence? Madelyn Detloff argues for modernism's relevance to our own age, a time of escalating loss, retribution and desire. Some of the social formations that inspired modernist cultural production - xenophobic nationalism and imperial hubris - are still with us. Writers such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, who saw themselves as outsiders with a precarious sense of belonging to their dominant culture, are, Detloff claims, still able to give us insight into our contemporary narratives of loss, recovery, memory and nation. Detloff extends her conceptualisation to include current writers like Pat Barker and Hanif Kureshi, who have taken up the modernist thread in their own work; the result is an ambitious study that will appeal to all students and scholars of modernism.