The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
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.

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
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.

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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781474494786
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 01/10/2023
Series: Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities
Pages: 552
Product dimensions: 6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x (d)

About the Author

Suzanne Hobson is Reader in 20th Century Literature in the English Department at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on modernism and literary theory and she is especially interested in questions of religion and secularism in the first half of the 20th century. She is the author of Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns (Oxford UniversityPress 2022) and Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-60 (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and co-editor of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (2010). She is past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies and co-organizer of the London Modernism Seminar.

Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. His books include British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945-1975 (co-edited with Hannah Van Hove, Palgrave, 2021), The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 (co-edited with Christine Ferguson, Routledge, 2018), Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Mapping the Wessex Novel: Landscape, History and the Parochial in British Literature, 1870–1940 (Bloomsbury, 2010). He has recently published a critical edition of Marie Corelli’s occult bestseller A Romance of Two Worlds (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2019).

Table of Contents

List of Figures

AcknowledgementsIntroduction, Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford

Part 1: Key Figures and Movements1. Ezra Pound versus T. S. Eliot on Christianity, Apocalypse, and Myth, 1934-1945, Erik Tonning2. Virginia Woolf and Christianity, Jane de Gay3. H.D. and Spirituality, Lara Vetter4. D.H. Lawrence’s Dark God, Luke Ferretter5. Harlem’s Bible Stories: Christianity and the New Negro Movement, Steven Pinkerton6. The Jewish East End and Modernism, Alexander Grafen

Part 2: Secularity, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment7. Troubled: Reverse Theodicy in Ward, Eliot, and Baldwin, Douglas Mao8. Modernism, Secular Hope, and the Posthumous Trace, David Sherman9. C.K. Ogden, I.A. Richards and “Word Magic”: Rethinking the Relation of Language to Myth, Leigh Wilson10. Jean Toomer and the Face of the Real: Between Sacred Presence and Disenchanting Violence, Matthew Mutter11. Modernism and Political Theology, Charles Andrews

Part 3: Religious Forms12. Virginia Woolf’s Agnostic, Visionary Mysticism, Gabrielle McIntire13. Modernism, Abstraction, and Spirituality: Barbara Hepworth and Hilma af Klint, Lorraine Sim14. Modernism and the Hymn, Sean Pryor15. William James, Mysticism, and the Modernist Epiphany, Graham H. Jensen

Part 4: Myth, Folklore and Magic16. Modernist Mythopoeia, Scott Freer17. Yeats’ Sacred Grove, Seán Hewitt18. The Modernist Grail Quest, Andrew Radford19. The Burial of the Dead in Mann’s The Magic Mountain: Approaching and Retreating from the Sacred, Pericles Lewis

Part 5: Modern Esotericism, Pantheism and Spiritualism20. The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy, Allan Kilner-Johnson21. Rebecca West, Modern Spiritualism, and the Problem of Other Minds, Jennifer Spitzer22. “What God hath joined, let no pragmatist put asunder”: May Sinclair’s Philosophical Idealism as Surrogate Religion, Rebecca Bowler

Part 6: Religious Space, Time and Ritual Practice23. Sacred Ground: Orthodoxy, Poetry and Religious Change, Jamie Callison24. Liminal spaces and spiritual practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison, Elizabeth Anderson25. Finnegans Wake, Modernist Time Machines, and Re-enchanted Time, Gregory Erickson

Part 7: Global Transitions and Exchange26. Global Seekers in The Quest: A Case Study of an Occult Periodical’s Worldly Religion, Mimi Winick27. “A Miserable Attenuation”: T. S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore and Irving Babbitt, Mafruha Mohua28. “Part heathen, part Christian”: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry, Sanja Bahun

Part 8: Queer[y]ing Religion 29. "It was really rather fine to be suffering": Radclyffe Hall at the Queer Intersection of Masochism and Martyrdom, Jennifer Mitchell30. The Byzantine Modernism of Djuna Barnes, Christos Hadjiyiannis31. “Mixed sex cases among goats”: The Modernist Sublime, Matte Robinson and Lisa Banks

Contributor biographies

Index

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