Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy
Jamie Callison
An open access monograph in Edinburgh University Press’s ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture’ series. The book is available as a free PDF or as a hardback book for purchase.
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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.”
Remaking religious poetry in a secular age
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 study attends to the strategic response of a range of religious authorities to an emerging mysticism. The work of T. S. Eliot, H.D. and David Jones, this 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 an international retreat movement – developments that resisted the silencing of religious voices in public debate. Modernism and Religion presents the long poems of these writers, marked by their internal heterogeneity, clashing registers and mechanical construction, as an alternative to epiphanic modernism, and positions what it terms their ‘wavering orthodoxy’ as a fusion of the sacred and the secular.
Jamie Callison describes why he’s interested in modernist poetry and what made religion so important to David Jones, T. S. Eliot and H.D. Video: Gunvor Helling/ UiA.
Transforming religious orthodoxy in the age of modernism
Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy:
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.