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"In her lucid and persuasive study, Kate Fullbrook shows bow women writers from Edith Wharton to Toni Morrison have used their fiction to help restructure our ethical landscape. Her book insists on the useful truth that feminism, with its moral centre, has still much to offer the late twentieth century." --Janet Todd, University of East Anglia In this sensitive and incisive study of eleven major twentieth-century women novelists, Kate Fullbrook traces the ethical and aesthetic impulses that have shaped their fiction. The result is a profoundly important way of reading women writers in the light of a new ethics for women. This book captures the sweep of women's literary achievement in the modern period and the impact of the radical new moral principles outlined in their fiction. The novelists included here are Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison. Fullbrook treats them not only as major literary figures in their own right but also as part of a tradition of women's writing that has as its project nothing less than an attempt to shift the moral ideas of the modern world. "This is an exciting, original, and informative study of twentieth-century women's fiction. It brings a vast amount of material together, yet manages never to lose or confuse the reader--always there is a clear line of argument. The approach is genuinely interdisciplinary in the best spirit of feminist inquiry and [Fullbrook's] readings are fresh and illuminating. Fullbrook's argument that these women writers restructure the ethical landscape by devising new patterns for measuring moral success or failure is persuasive. Her discussion of the way they rebuild from the philosophical rubble of relativism, the way they intervene at a moment of cultural disjunction to propose alternative futures, is convincing and important." --Gayle Green, Scripps College

The modernism of the future will not look like the modernism of the past. Over the past twenty years, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and other major figures of the modernist movement have been subject to postmodernist critiques that have seen them as reactionary upholders of oppressive class, gender, racial, or other hierarchies; these critiques have permanently altered conceptions of the program and the canon of modernism. Today, revolutions in editing and publishing seem likely to transform them still further. The contributors to The Future of Modernism take these sea-changes into account, acknowledging and learning from the developments of recent years. Some interrogate the antithesis between modernism and postmodernism, showing that the former contains many features commonly claimed for the latter. Other essays dissociate modernism from the New Critical formalism with which it is often confused. Still others explore the modernist legacy of engagement with political and social events, challenging characterizations of modernism as an ahistorical, universalistic ideology. Together, these eleven essays by distinguished scholars contest facile dismissals of modernist writing and affirm an unshakable conviction of its continuing relevance and value. Although they project no unified vision or prophecy, the essays suggest a variety of lively trajectories into the next century.