Morality and Anglo-American Modernism
updated:
Friday, April 8, 2022 - 8:24pm
Modernist Studies Association
deadline for submissions:
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
In the years leading up to the publication of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot decried what he called the moral cowardice endemic to post-war London, and particularly to its literary circles. D. H. Lawrence was similarly preoccupied with morality in his literary critical essays, writing, for example, that "Morality in the novel is the trembling instablity of the balance [between opposing forces]. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality." And, finally, Hemingway once suggested to a group of professors that of all his novels, the best to teach is The Sun Also Rises because, he said, it is a "very moral novel."