Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy

by Jamie Callison

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474457231
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2025
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture
Edition description:	96,524
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jamie Callison is Associate Professor of English Literature at Universityof 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 He has published (with Thomas Goldpaugh) a critical edition of a previously unpublished book-length poem by the modernist poet and painter David Jones entitled The Grail Mass (2018).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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Wavering Orthodoxy; 1. Mass Distraction: Between Rites and Rights in David Jones; 2. Spiritual Pathology: Diagnosing T. S. Eliot’s Unconscious Christianity; 3. Reversion Therapy: The Personalism of H.D.’s Return to Religion; 4. Silent Protest: The Retreat Movement, 1920—45; Conclusion: The Distraction of Religious Poetry; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

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