Overview

Explores the transformation of religious orthodoxy in the age of modernism Provides a historical and theoretically informed account of mysticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Details the significance of a range of religious practices to modernism, including communal worship, conversion, and retreat. Reads modernism through the lens of recent postsecular theory. Offers close readings of major works by David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and H.D., including the first extended discussion of Jones's recently published The Grail Mass, informed by extensive work in the personal archives and libraries of individual authors. Outlines an expanded understanding of religious poetry. Modernism and Religion argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian sociology, and philosophical personalism, which are explored here in relation to the work of David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and H.D., represented a strategic attempt on the part of diverse religious authorities to meet the challenge posed by new mysticism. Orthodoxy was itself made new in ways that resisted the secular demand that religion remain a private undertaking. Modernism and Religion presents the mechanical form and clashing registers of long poems by each of the aforementioned writers as an alternative to epiphanic modernism. Their wavering orthodoxy brings matters from which the secular had previously separated religion back once more into its purview.

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9781474457224

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"""A perceptive, absorbing, irreplaceable study. In showing how modernist writing was shaped by an interplay between the claims of mysticism as individual experience and the benefits of ecclesiastical frameworks, Callison illuminates a rich seam of innovation and perplexity not just in Jones, Eliot and H.D. but in the broader life of early twentieth-century Christianity."" -Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University"

Author Information

Jamie Callison is Associate Professor of English Literature at University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, where he teaches courses on poetry and poetics, modernism and religion and literature. His articles on T. S. Eliot, David Jones and twentieth-century religious culture have appeared in ELH, Literature and Theology and Modernist Cultures. He has published (with Thomas Goldpaugh) a critical edition of a previously unpublished book-length poem by the modernist poet and painter David Jones entitled The Grail Mass (2018). Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy is his first monograph.

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