Blake Piel

Thesis Title: Experimental Virtue: Masculinity and American Modernism, 1919-1939

Supervisor: Professor Nicholas Gaskill

My research explores what happens to masculinity in a crisis of virtue, and how American modernism conceives of that crisis. I consider novels and poetry by Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Hart Crane alongside early twentieth-century philosophical accounts of morality, including those of William James and John Dewey, to examine the possibilities that literary modernism, as a space of experimentation, offers for reimagining virtuous manhood amid societal transformation.