Martin Halliwell traces the intersection of artistic and moral ideas in European and American literary modernism, focusing on a range of decadent, naturalist, avant-garde, and expatriate authors writing between 1890 and 1940. Halliwell challenges traditional views of modernism, arguing that early twentieth-century writers such as Conrad, Faulkner, Gide, Kafka, Mann, and Stein devised new aesthetic techniques to address ethical problems. Part I deals with decadence and naturalism; Part II symbolic centers of modernism; Part III sexual and cultural difference; and Part IV modernist trickery. In this new edition, Halliwell explores modernist traditions in the twenty-first century, literary responses to the 9/11 attacks, and the shifting parameters of national morality.