This chapter surveys Ellison’s complex relationship with other key Modernist writers, as expressed both explicitly in his letters and chapters, and implicitly in his short stories, in Invisible Man, and in Three Days Before the Shooting … . Examining key moments in his intellectual formation, such as his encounters with Eliot and Joyce during his undergraduate studies at Tuskegee, it also maps out the paradox of his attested admiration for but rare intertextual dialogue with Hemingway, and his ambivalent and shifting positions on Faulkner. Lastly, it suggests that despite Ellison’s and Morrison’s mutual and clearly voiced antipathy, these two writers have far more in common, particularly in terms of their conceptions of Modernism, than either would like to admit. Throughout my overview, I will take account of the best pre-existing scholarship on this subject.

This chapter locates the place of Salafism among other vying movements at the time, particularly Islamic Modernism and Traditionalism. By the end of the thirteenth century, Traditionalism had reached its mature, institutional form. At the core of Traditionalism were the four madhhabs that provided systematic interpretations of Islamic law and to which Muslim scholars and their educational systems held guild-like loyalty. Islamic Modernists largely viewed and interpreted the principal Islamic texts, and called for ijtihād, through the prism of modernity. For Modernists, it was essential to reform Islamic teachings in light of modern advancements. They were concerned with making Islam relevant and meaningful to the present. I end this chapter with a discussion of the different types of Salafis.

The centrality of decadence to the development of modernism is clear in the work of the major modernist figures James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann. Joyce expatiates on decadent traits with such encyclopaedic abandon in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses that they finally evince something absurd and mysterious in human nature, whereas in In Search of Lost Time Proust more tightly aligns decadent traits with the burden of personal character and societal malaise. Mann, in underscoring both medical and metaphysical aspects of decadence, links with Joyce and Proust at many points. These prominent modernists reflect awareness of two basic polarities that first emerged in the decadent era of the fin de siècle: on the one side, concern over disintegrative forces in the modern world and realization of the need to take spiritual and aesthetic shelter; and, on the other, a sense of the aesthetic imperative to harvest the gains which the opportunity of such a moment presented.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.