Skip Nav Destination
Close Modal
1-20 of 377
Search Results for moral
Follow your search
Access your saved searches in your account
Would you like to receive an alert when new items match your search?
1
Journal Article
The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism by Mary K. Holland
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2020) 66 (4): 521–527.
Published: 01 December 2020
..., and Fielding . Berkeley : University of California Press . The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism , by Holland Mary K. . New York : Bloomsbury , 2020 . 288 pages. Copyright © 2020 Hofstra University 2020 Early in her compelling first book, Succeeding Postmodernism (2014) , Mary...
Journal Article
Transnationalism in Contemporary Post-Soviet North American Literature
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2019) 65 (1-2): 145–166.
Published: 01 March 2019
... and the spread of Russian corruption abroad through a focus on immigrants and their visitors. Bezmozgis’s and Litman’s characters are prevented from going back to former Soviet Republics by their intense dislike of the moral corruption in their former homeland. In Absurdistan (2006), by contrast, Shteyngart...
Journal Article
Decadent Dinosaurs: Directed Evolution in British and North American Literature, 1890s–1970s
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2024) 70 (1): 55–84.
Published: 01 March 2024
... these texts, the essay argues that directed evolution offered a recognizable trajectory with which to render the complexity and strangeness of prehistoric and modern life alike into a familiar linear shape by reading certain extinct animals as moral exemplars of evolutionary failure. While reformers hoped...
FIGURES
Journal Article
“A Not-Exactly-Good Man”: Lionel Trilling on Law and Judgment
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2018) 64 (2): 129–160.
Published: 01 June 2018
... and accidentally kills Claggart, the ship’s sinister master-at-arms). Maxim’s reactionary interpretation lionizes Vere as the expression of the “world of Necessity” ( MJ 182) to which the morally pure Billy must be sacrificed, a view that Nancy Croom—still a committed leftist—surprisingly agrees with, evoking...
Journal Article
James Merrill’s Manners and Elizabeth Bishop’s Dismay
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2004) 50 (2): 167–191.
Published: 01 June 2004
... into the service of flattery and aggression, the moral func
tion of demonstrating respect.
To align manners and morals as Merrill does is to challenge the fa
miliar claim that manners are essentially practices of exclusion and inclu
sion, social strategies of power and distinction. This is an important...
Journal Article
The Class Dynamics of Antiracism in Go Set a Watchman
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2023) 69 (2): 121–146.
Published: 01 June 2023
... being. As primarily a novelist rather than a political theorist or activist, Lee in Watchman was ultimately more concerned with registering moral-psychic complexity—what Faulkner (1950) called “the human heart in conflict with itself”—than with antiracist ideological rigor. For the same reason I...
Journal Article
The Course of a Particular: On the Ethics of Literary Singularity
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2004) 50 (3): 207–238.
Published: 01 September 2004
...: the course
of a literary particular leads to ethical discovery.
According to Stevens, however, such a discovery “concerns no one
at all.”This hardly sounds like a strong moral position,1 and defining that
position in relation to the artistry that exposes it will be my subject. My
own...
Journal Article
Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and Ulysses
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2001) 47 (2): 217–240.
Published: 01 June 2001
...
of the Romish Priesthood, the Iniquity of the Confessional, and the Questions
Put to Females in Confession, a diatribe alleging moral shortcomings of
the Catholic Church. According to the court, about half of the pam
phlet related to “casuistical and controversial questions...
Journal Article
Virginia Woolf and “The Third Generation”
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (1): 27–58.
Published: 01 March 2014
... Victorian generations of writers. Her earliest novels
both acknowledge and deny the significant impact of Victorian debates
on aesthetics, morality, and the relation between the two, on her own
creative practice.
A key instance of thinking back through, or with, the Victorian
grandfather...
Journal Article
Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human by Maren Tova Linett
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2023) 69 (1): 105–112.
Published: 01 March 2023
... construct moral issues related to disability and animality. The book engages with moral philosophy, biopolitics, and posthumanism, all of which Linett suggests can be encompassed within a broader definition of bioethics, although some readers might prefer to maintain distinctions between these diverse...
Journal Article
Why Multiculturalism Still Matters
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2005) 51 (3): 378–384.
Published: 01 September 2005
... the drug dealers reduced sentences in exchange for
their cooperation in building cases against the politicians. Jimmy McNulty
(Dominic West), the Irish American cop who is The Wire’s troubled but
noble moral center, launches into one of his characteristic outbursts. “No,
fuck...
Journal Article
John Ashbery’s Elizabeth Bishop
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (4): 448–471.
Published: 01 December 2008
... are repeatedly provoked to moral justification or
judgment, strategies of moral accounting that border on special pleading,
ranging from defensiveness and justification to appeals for forgiveness. The
basic poses are those of the Christian sinner before his or her Lord, and
at times Ashbery s speakers...
Journal Article
Catholicism, Character, and the Invention of the Liberal Novel Tradition
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2002) 48 (2): 215–238.
Published: 01 June 2002
... with the
transcendent moral problems raised by the recent history of human atroc
ity. Iris Murdoch considered it “curious that modern literature, which is
so much concerned with violence, contains so few convincing pictures
of evil” (30):
We no longer see man against a background of values, of reali...
Journal Article
Sense and Censorship
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2009) 55 (2): 262–268.
Published: 01 June 2009
... extensive deployment.
The problems with Mooney’s ethical agenda become further evident
in her discussion of Lolita, a novel that presents a more acute challenge for
readers concerned with moral redemption or judgment. Mooney opens
her chapter with the assertion that “Nabokov, with Lolita...
Journal Article
Learning to Hate the Hun
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2011) 57 (2): 264–271.
Published: 01 June 2011
...; children were encouraged to hate the enemy
and love war, thus predisposing them to become cannon fodder in some
future conflict; young women were morally coerced into joining the Red
Cross or performing other useful wartime work, while housewives were
264Twentieth-Century Literature 57.2...
Journal Article
“Interested in Big Things, and Happy in Small Ways”: Curiosity in Edith Wharton
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2018) 64 (1): 79–100.
Published: 01 March 2018
... right to insist on the centrality of reverence and continuity to Wharton’s social ideal; hers was, in the final analysis, a conservative mind. Still, his account of Wharton’s moral outlook fails to do justice to the complexity of her position, as it neglects to consider the vital role that curiosity...
Journal Article
Writing Dialectic
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2005) 51 (2): 249–258.
Published: 01 June 2005
... the fragment bespeaks a certain
worldview, and there are those who would see poetry as almost having a
moral imperative to represent fragmentedness in a kind of disjunctive but
nonetheless mimetic manner.
Nathaniel Mackey is one poet in the Williams line of disjunctive,
experimental poetics...
Journal Article
Darwin’s Bulldog and Huxley’s Ape
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2009) 55 (4): 572–596.
Published: 01 December 2009
... pass
from evolution to ethics or vice versa. His ethics is marked by what I’m
tempted to call a kind of moral autism—an absence of affective categories,
even basic ones like happiness—and refers instead to the rawest calculus of
survival, which he tends to call “the means of existence” (293...
Journal Article
Regarding Others
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (2): 247–254.
Published: 01 June 2008
... show
how, at its best, literature may promote humanistic regard for the other
and affirm moral centeredness and political responsibility not through
self-assertion and exclusion but rather by raising the possibility that there
are “multiple worlds” for subjectivity. Reading their work, we may...
Journal Article
Ethical Limits and Confession in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and “Poland Revisited”
Available to Purchase
Twentieth-Century Literature (2013) 59 (1): 79–103.
Published: 01 March 2013
... narrative closure and moral redemption. Such an analysis of Conrad’s
elaboration of confession illuminates the genealogy of a discursive form
that persists beyond the modernist moment, as Peter Brooks has shown,
and comes increasingly to dominate literary, political, and cultural narra-
tives...
1
