Modernism and Religion

Explores the religious underpinnings of modernist creativity Modernism and Religion locates modernism in the ferment of twentieth-century religious change. While the literary epiphany channelled modernist fascination with immanence and religious immediacy, the present study attends to the strategic response of a range of religious authorities to the new mysticism. The work of T. S. Eliot, H.D., and David Jones, the present study argues, was shaped by an orthodoxy made new in the age of modernism. These poets responded to the crisis of modernity through an engagement with Catholic theological modernism, the liturgical revival, human rights, Christian sociology, philosophical personalism and the emergent retreat movement - discourses that resisted the silencing of religious voices in public debate. Modernism and Religion presents the long poems of each of these writers, marked by their internal heterogeneity, clashing registers and mechanical construction, as an alternative to epiphanic modernism, and positions what the study terms their 'wavering orthodoxy' as a fusion of the sacred and the secular. Jamie Callison is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. His publications include The Grail Mass (2018) and articles on T. S. Eliot, David Jones and twentieth-century religious culture which have appeared in ELH, Literature and Theology, and Modernist Cultures among other venues. Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy is his first monograph.