Until fairly recently, the ‘Authorized Version’ of cultural modernism stated that the secularizing trends of liberal modernity – and the resultant emphasis on irony, parody and dissolution in modernist artforms – had pushed religion to the edges of early twentieth-century culture. This Companion complicates this ‘Authorized Version’ by furnishing students and academic researchers with more nuanced and probing assessments of the intersections – and tensions – between religion, myth and creativity during this half century of geopolitical ferment. The Companion addresses the variety and specificity of modernist spiritualities; as well as the intricately textured and shifting standpoints that modernist figures have occupied in relation to theological traditions, practices, creeds, and institutions. What emerges is a multi-textured account of modernism’s deep-rooted concern with the historical and established forms of religion as well as new engagements with ‘occulture’ and indigenous traditions. In short, this Companion supplies a lively and original introduction to the aesthetic, publishing, technological and philosophical trends that shape debates about spirituality, community and self from the 1890s to the 1940s and beyond.
Author(s): Suzanne Hobson, Andrew Radford
Series: Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 544
City: Edinburgh
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction • Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford
Part I: Key Figures and Movements
1. Ezra Pound versus T. S. Eliot on Christianity, Apocalypse and Myth, 1934–1945 • Erik Tonning
2. Virginia Woolf and Christianity • Jane de Gay
3. H.D. and Spirituality • Lara Vetter
4. D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God • Luke Ferretter
5. Harlem’s Bible Stories: Christianity and the New Negro Movement • Steve Pinkerton
6. The Jewish East End and Modernism • Alex Grafen
Part II: Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment
7. Troubled: Reverse Theodicy in Ward, Eliot and Baldwin • Douglas Mao
8. Modernism, Secular Hope and the Posthumous Trace • David Sherman
9. C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards and ‘Word Magic’: Rethinking the Relation of Language to Myth • Leigh Wilson
10. Jean Toomer and the Face of the Real: Between Sacred Presence and Disenchanting Violence • Matthew Mutter
11. Modernism and Political Theology • Charles Andrews
Part III: Religious Forms
12. Virginia Woolf’s Agnostic, Visionary Mysticism: Approaching and Retreating from the Sacred • Gabrielle McIntire
13. Modernism, Abstraction and Spirituality: Barbara Hepworth and Hilma af Klint • Lorraine Sim
14. Modernism and the Hymn • Sean Pryor
15. William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany • Graham H. Jensen
Part IV: Myth, Folklore and Magic
16. Modernist Mythopoeia • Scott Freer
17. Yeats’s Sacred Grove • Seán Hewitt
18. The Modernist Grail Quest • Andrew Radford
19. The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain • Pericles Lewis
Part V: Modern Esotericism, Pantheism and Spiritualism
20. The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy • Allan Kilner-Johnson
21. Rebecca West, Modern Spiritualism and the Problem of Other Minds • Jennifer Spitzer
22. ‘What God hath joined, let no pragmatist put asunder’: May Sinclair’s Philosophical Idealism as Surrogate Religion • Rebecca Bowler
Part VI: Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice
23. Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change • Jamie Callison
24. Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison • Elizabeth Anderson
25. Finnegans Wake, Modernist Time Machines and Re-enchanted Time • Gregory Erickson
Part VII: Global Transitions and Exchange
26. Global Seekers in The Quest: A Case Study of an Occult Periodical’s Worldly Religion • Mimi Winick
27. ‘A Miserable Attenuation’: T. S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore and Irving Babbitt • Mafruha Mohua
28. ‘Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry • Sanja Bahun
Part VIII: Queer[y]ing Religion
29. ‘It was really rather fine to be suffering’: Radclyffe Hall at the Queer Intersection of Masochism and Martyrdom • Jennifer Mitchell
30. The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes • Christos Hadjiyiannis
31. ‘Mixed sex cases among goats’: The Modernist Sublime • Matte Robinson and Lisa Banks
Contributor Biographies
Index
