Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to the Uncanny

David Ellison’s book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism. Ellison’s study traces the origins of Modernism to the emergence of early German Romanticism from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and emphasizes how the passage from Romanticism to Modernism can be followed in the gradual transition from the sublime to the uncanny. Arguing that what we call High Modernism cannot be reduced to a religion of beauty, an experimentation with narrative form, or even a reflection on time and consciousness, Ellison demonstrates that Modernist textuality is characterized by the intersection, overlapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues. Beauty and morality relate to each other as antagonists struggling for dominance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the one hand (Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud) and imaginative literature on the other (Baudelaire, Proust, Gide, Conrad, Woolf, Kafka).

• Ambitious study of a wide range of influential authors, including novelists and philosophers • Ellison develops his argument through close readings of a broad scope of texts • Of interest to specialists in Kant, Proust, Kafka, Conrad and Woolf, among others

Preface; Part I. Kant, Romantic Irony, Unheimlichkeit: 1. Border crossings in Kant; 2. Kierkegaard on the economics of living poetically; 3. Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’: the intricacies of textual uncanniness; Part II. The Romantic Heritage and Modernist Fiction: 4. Aesthetic redemption: the Thyrsus in Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner; 5. The ‘beautiful soul’: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and the aesthetics of Romanticism; 6. Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings; 7. Textualizing immoralism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Gide’s L’Immoraliste; 8. Fishing the waters of impersonality: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Epilogue: narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot: the ‘singing’ of Josefine; Notes; Index.