David Ellison's book is an ambitious presentation of the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Modernist literature. The author brings together philosophical, theoretical, and literary texts ranging over a century and a half of intellectual history--from Kant and Kierkegaard to Freud and Woolf. His study reveals how the struggle between aesthetic and ethical issues characterizes each of them. He combines the insights of philosophical conceptualization, narratology, and psychoanalytic theory to illuminate the historical passage from the sublime to the uncanny during the 150-year period between 1790-1940.