The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature

by Eugene Webb

Overview

In a subtle exposition of the tension between sacred and secular themes in twentieth-century literature, Eugene Webb analyzes works by Yeats, Mann, Rilke, Stevens, Beckett, Joyce, Nietzsche, Eliot, Auden, and Ibsen. He demonstrates the connection between modern literature and religious tradition, and shows how conceptions of the sacred and its relation to the secular have been transformed in modern literary imagery.

Webb considers the writers he discusses to be the true explorers of their generation, who have had to find a new symbolic language in which to understand and express their "idea of the holy." Because the sacred consists of "additude" and "experience" as well as "concept," Webb maintains that it receives its most direct and adequate expression in works of imaginative literature, where imagery can combine the intellectual and emotional elements of the sacred and communicate them to the reader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295953779
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	05/01/1975
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Eugene Webb is professor emeritus in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

Table of Contents

I The Paradox of the Sacred 3

II The Tradition of the Sacred in the West 12

III The Ambiguities of Secularization: Modern Transformations of the Kingdom in Nietzsche, Ibsen, Beckett, and Stevens 34

IV The One and the Many: The Ambiguous Challenge of Being in the Poetry of Yeats and Rilke 88

V A Darkness Shining in Brightness: James Joyce and the Obscure Soul of the World 111

VI The Perilous Journey to Wholeness in Thomas Mann 157

VII The Way Up and the Way Down: The Redemption of Time in T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" and Four Quartets 194

VIII W. H. Auden: The Ambiguity of the Sacred 237

IX Conclusion 264

Bibliography 271

Index 277