Morality and Anglo-American Modernism
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."
This panel seeks papers that address the relationship between problems of morality and the formal innovations developed to resolve them (or to avoid their resolution) in the canon of Anglo-American modernist literature.
Please submit a 250-word abstract and short bio by April 19, 2022.