Overview

Presents authoritative analyses of the religious terrain of the modernist period Presents authoritative scholarly analyses of the religious terrain of the modernist period Includes 30 + specially commissioned chapters on modernist myth, religion and alternative spirituality representing the breadth and freshness of research in this area Foregrounds early-career scholars as well as internationally recognized researchers who have illuminated the field of modernist discourse around religion and myth Responds to and builds upon a renewed scholarly fascination with modernist experiment, religious history, and theology a field of interest which has energized the humanities, especially in literary and cultural studies Highlights the interconnections between spirituality, aesthetics, and politics in this period Until fairly recently, the 'Authorised Version' of cultural modernism stated that the secularising 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 understanding 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. It 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, the Companion supplies a lively and original exploration of 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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9781474494786

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Reviews

"""This astounding collection woke me up from my dogmatic slumber and clich s about the secular nature of modernism. Essay after essay, one gets a clear sense of the richness, multiplicity and centrifugal potential of the varieties of modernist religious experience. This comprehensive Companion redefines modernism as spiritual, haunted by transcendence, hesitating between personal illumination and collective ritual, caught between esoteric mysticism and masochistic devotion, hence more dynamic and exciting than we thought. It will be an indispensable reference for all scholars of modernism."" -Jean-Michel Rabat , University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences"

Author Information

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 University Press 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 University Press, 2019).

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