Music and literary modernism : critical essays and comparative studies

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  • pt. 1. Criticism, music and literature. The sonority of language in literary and musical modernity / Marc Derveaux ; Sounds like now : music, avant-gardism, and the post-modern sublime / Kiene Brillenburg Wurth ; Boulez, Joyce, Mallarmé : music as modernist literature / Zbigniew Granat
  • pt. 2. Musical and literary interactions. Within a space of tears : music, writing, and the modern in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage out / Emma Sutton ; "Dear EzzROAR", "Dear Anthill" : Ezra Pound, George Antheil and the complications of patronage / Erin E. Templeton ; Not just tangle and drift : music as metaphor in the poetry of W.B. Yeats / Juli White ; The sound of an idea : music in the modernist writings of Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein / Tanya Dalziell ; Musical and ideological synthesis in James Weldon Johnson's The autobiography of an ex-colored man / Michael Kardos ; Opera, maternal influence, and gender in Ernest Hemingway's The Ash Heel's Tendon / Lisa Tyler ; Music : Wallace Stevens' supreme fiction / Karl Coulthard
  • pt. 3. Musical aesthetics and the mystical. A performance analysis of Messiaen's Abime des oiseaux from The quartet for the end of time : the musical mechanics of mysticism / Tamara Raatz ; Unstable metaphors of divinity : Proust's theology of musical aesthetics / Gregory Erickson ; Silent music in James Joyce's Sirens / Enrico Terrinoni
  • pt. 4. Modernism and popular culture. T.S. Eliot and ubiquitous music, 1909-1922 / T. Austin Graham ; The Beatles as modernists / Kenneth Womack.

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Robert P. McParland

Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies Hardcover – December 1, 2009

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  • Print length 224 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • Publication date December 1, 2009
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  • ISBN-10 1443814024
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2nd Revised edition (December 1, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1443814024
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1443814027
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.25 inches

About the author

Robert p. mcparland.

Robert McParland is a professional member of the Authors Guild, Dramatists Guild, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), Nashville Songwriters International, Modern Language Association, Victorian Studies Association, and the Dickens Society. He has won the Kornitzer Award, has been a Writer’s Network, Hollywood, California, playwriting semi-finalist, and has won the Nettleton/Hirsch Poetry Award. As a musician, he has worked with several well-known music artists, has had songs aired on radio and cable television, and has written the lyrics and book for two musicals. His publications include fiction, poetry, plays, and more than sixty essays and articles on literature, history, and popular culture and music. His most recent novel is The Last Alchemist.

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Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies 2nd Edition

Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies 2nd Edition

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In Music and Literary Modernism, the intersections of music, literature and language are examined by an international group of scholars who engage in studies of modernist art and practice. The essays collected here present the significant place of music in the writing of T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, James Weldon Johnson, Mina Loy, Stephen Mallarme, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein,Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf, as well as the importance of literary art for composers such as George Antheil, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messaein, and The Beatles. Contributors explore the role of music and literary modernism in the postmodern sublime, sound and "music" in language, the uneasy alliance of jazz and pop song in high modernist work, the Beatles as modernists, and other topics.

This is a revised and updated second edition.

Dr. Robert McParland is an Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and a composer and lyricist. He is the author of Music-The Speech of Angels (2002) and numerous essays on Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist writers, and has developed musicals based upon the writings of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.

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Founded in 1963, Comparative Literature Studies publishes critical comparative essays on literature, cultural production, the relationship between aesthetics and political thought, and histories and philosophies of form across the world. Articles may also address the transregional and transhistorical circulation of genres and movements across different languages, time periods, and media. CLS welcomes a wide range of approaches to comparative literature, including those that draw on philosophy, history, area studies, Indigenous, race, and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, media studies, and emerging critical projects and methods in the humanities. Each issue of CLS also includes book reviews of significant monographs and collections of scholarship in comparative literature.

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Comparing the Literatures: Contemporary Perspectives

literary modernism critical essays and comparative studies

This article revisits Johann Gottfried Herder’s 1773 essay on Shakespeare. What makes Herder’s critical essay remarkable, it argues, is not just that it models the nominalist and culturalist outlook that would go on to have far-reaching implications for the history of comparative literature and related disciplines, but also that it recognizes the existential consequences of adopting the thoroughgoing culturalist and historicist self-image that it promotes. Herder’s meditation on cultural finitude in Shakespeare flows directly from his insistence that human beings are social and historical creatures and carries important lessons for the interpretive humanities today.

The following article is a comparative reading of medieval Othering in the context of monsters and maskhs . While monsters had an integral role in defining the non-Christian Other in the West, maskhs played a similar role in the East. The article suggests that understanding the meaning, function, and interaction of monsters and maskhs in the Middle Ages contributes to further understanding the concept of medieval Othering that can still be noticed even in today’s world.

Animals in the 1948 War carry secrets hidden in plain sight. In this essay we employ a shift that is related to ecocriticism and animal studies to examine stories of the 1948 War, seeking the language and imaginings of, and about, animals of Palestine for untold aspects of its story. We ask how the depiction of animals in Palestinian and Israeli literatures helps us understand other dimensions of space, life, and death in Palestine/Israel and their narratives of 1948. Reading in works by S. Yizhar, Emile Habiby, and Anton Shammas, it appears animals hold a humanistic message for all living things, a message that continues to be passed on from generation to generation, even if only in whispers.

In this article, I contrast two types of transnationalism — regionalism and cosmopolitanism — as they feature in David Damrosch’s Comparing the Literatures . I do so by assessing Damrosch’s arguments on the comparability of magical realism and by teasing out their implications for the book’s larger aims. I am interested in Damrosch’s arguments to the extent that they exemplify what I believe is an unexamined assumption of some of the major voices in the transnational turn, especially in the field of global modernism.

If the actions of K. — who arrives as a stranger at the village and pretends to be the land surveyor — are taken seriously, The Castle has to be read as a theater play in which the protagonist is trying to achieve a role that was never made for him. When K. tries to create his own reality through speech acts and thus starts a fight with the center of meaning production — with the castle — he himself becomes the allegory of a minor, that means a revolutionary, writing. This article aims to accomplish a reading of Kafka’s novel that reveals aspects of its relation to world theater as well as to the minor Yiddish theater — comparing The Castle with Kafka’s diary entries in which he wrote down his observances of the performances of the Yiddish theater group which took place in 1911 and 1912 in Prague cafés ten years before Kafka began writing the novel.

The novels of emigration during the French Revolution written by female authors such as Stéphanie de Genlis, Adélaïde de Souza, Isabelle de Charrière, and Claire de Duras constitute a corpus that highlights the notion of hospitality and broadens the scope of its meanings. This article argues that the link between emigration and hospitality is a choice related, among other things, to the female authors’ condition in the literary field of their time — i.e., their struggle for professional recognition is an institutional fact determining in many ways their writing choices and practices. It explains, among other things, the critical sensitivity of the multiple aspects of hospitality as it is deployed in the novels of emigration written by women. The term of “­literary scene,” borrowed from Judith Schlanger, considers the corpus presented here as a historical scenario impacting the “situations of speech,” and therefore it contributes by identifying the thematic and narrative specificity of a “local” corpus and reflecting on a more global literary phenomenon. By circumscribing a particular literary framework, this article explores the convergence points between the émigré condition and the importance of the environmental qualities of hospitality in the fiction of the female author at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Thus, it aims to shed light on the specificity of emigration novels written by women.

This essay takes the standpoint of a specialist of Chinese literature to consider the question of what kind of knowledge literary studies produces. I believe that confronting this question head-on is critical to our discipline’s renewal. Moving between the personal and the theoretical, I suggest that anthropology can provide useful tools in making sense of politically and culturally distant texts in the age of world literature. To illustrate my point, I revisit the question of flat characters in traditional Chinese fiction in light of new research in the anthropology of mind. In the end, I propose that literary studies move toward the “new humanities” in order to make itself relevant to broader constituencies.

Literature is conventionally thought to consist of two complementary, comprehensive categories: poetry and prose. The first part of this essay argues this to be a contingent Western construct which goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans and seeks to demonstrate that it indeed is not to be found in the neighboring ancient literary cultures of biblical Hebrew and early Islamic Arabic. The second part suggests that this difference is correlated to these cultures’ conceptions of the language of their god(s), a suggestion which can be seen to complement Erich Auerbach’s argument in Mimesis regarding the separation and mixture of styles in antiquity.

This article is an attempt to shed new light on dictionaries in the context of comparative literature, thinking of them not only as a tool necessary for working in the field, but as an object worthy of the field’s imaginative, interpretive, and cross-­cultural methods. As a starting point, we focus on the strange case of Holocaust-Yiddish dictionaries. Seeming outliers of lexicography, these texts challenge us to recognize the ethical, emotional, and even spiritual potency of the genre. Inspired by these challenges, we then revisit a diverse set of prominent dictionary texts: the Oxford English Dictionary, an interwar lexicon of Yiddish jargon, the Chinese Erya, and the Hebrew-Arabic Ha-Egron . This comparative journey reveals a productive tension within the genre: while the dictionary promises to organize and categorize language, it can often reveal that which is unknowable in speech and in experience.

The current essay suggests a form of reading inspired by both the sense of smell and the phenomenon of smell. It is composed of two theoretical parts. The first aims at formulating a comparative model deriving from the conceptual history of smell and from its attributes as a physical phenomenon. The second theoretical part examines the peculiar materiality of smell as part of an atmosphere and the possible implications it might have on the link/rupture between literature and life. Finally, it brings the theory into practice, reading a story from the Israeli literary canon, attempting to air it and present alternatives to its familiar, canonical readings and interpretations.

This article considers how a literature that travels between languages and cultures challenges dominant narrations of gender variance by undermining a stable sense of time and place. Tracing what I call a temporality “out of sync” in Yiddish-language writer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” [“Yentl der Yeshive Bokher”], I contend that his work suspends contemporary medical categorizations of transness: it is through the entanglement of the temporal outlandishness of Yiddish demons with rabbinic as well as early-twentieth century sexological accounts of gender variance that the story disrupts the logic of progress inherent in mid-twentieth-century understandings of the medico-juridical category of “transsexuality.” Reading temporal disjunction and resistance to categorize transness in “Yentl” as a means to question the diagnosability of gender variance in the first place, this perspective configurates transness as a space of possibility at the intersections of temporal, linguistic, and geographical migrations.

This paper examines the circus setting in Hebrew literature as a supra­national theme that expresses the worldly in literature. Focusing on three circus stories by Hebrew modernist author Gershon Shofman, the paper stresses a distinct concept of physical power and its political implications. It suggests that through this power concept, the circus phenomenon lends a worldly perspective to Shofman’s twentieth-­century Hebrew literature, which is usually read in a national context.

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Comparative Literature Studies

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  • Volume 60, Number 1, 2023

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Founded in 1963, Comparative Literature Studies publishes critical comparative essays on literature, cultural production, the relationship between aesthetics and political thought, and histories and philosophies of form across the world. Articles may also address the transregional and transhistorical circulation of genres and movements across different languages, time periods, and media. CLS welcomes a wide range of approaches to comparative literature, including those that draw on philosophy, history, area studies, Indigenous, race, and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, media studies, and emerging critical projects and methods in the humanities. Each issue of CLS also includes book reviews of significant monographs and collections of scholarship in comparative literature. For more information, please visit also the journal's website at https://cl-studies.la.psu.edu/.

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  • Editorial Note: On Sentient Flesh and the Horizons of Comparatism
  • Nergis Ertürk

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  • Notes on Sentient Flesh
  • “Play Yo’ Part”: A Note on Poēisis in Black
  • Bedour Alagraa
  • Love-Improper, in Deed: Review of Sentient Flesh
  • Loving Sentient Flesh
  • Jeffrey Sacks
  • The Ancestors Call from the Future: Genealogy, Ancestrality, Judgment
  • Rosalind C. Morris
  • Of Life and Death: African Cultural Worldviews and Black American Survival in Toni Morrison’s s ong of Solomon and Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship
  • Portia Owusu
  • Writing Mobility, Writing Stillness: Silvia Mistral’s Transatlantic Displacements
  • Tabea Alexa Linhard
  • Dogs and the Politics of Il|legal Border Crossing: Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law and Marios Piperides’s Smuggling Hendrix
  • Angelos Evangelou
  • pp. 123-149
  • The Revival of Pamphletary Speech in the Twenty-First Century: The Rhetoric of Reversal
  • Amina Damerdji
  • pp. 150-175
  • Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle (review)
  • Christopher Bush
  • pp. 176-179
  • At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War by Monica Popescu (review)
  • Cajetan Iheka
  • pp. 179-181
  • Premises and Problems: Essays on World Literature and Cinema by Luiza Franco Moreira (review)
  • Rupsa Banerjee
  • pp. 182-184
  • Global TV Horror ed. by Stacey Abbott and Lorna Jowett (review)
  • Karen J. Renner
  • pp. 184-187
  • The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction ed. by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper (review)
  • Febin Vijay, Priyanka Tripathi
  • pp. 187-191
  • The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation by Jason Demers (review)
  • John Protevi
  • pp. 191-193

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The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology

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10 Modernism

Cleo McNelly Kearns is a non-resident fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.

  • Published: 02 September 2009
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While a literary and critical modernism seems on the surface independent of and at times oblivious to theological modernism, the modernist stances taken by major twentieth-century artists and writers raise theological issues and concerns with which they are very much engaged. These issues are incarnated in their stylistic and formal innovations as well as in their range of interests, often sensitive as well as challenging to conservative and orthodox understandings of Christianity and prescient with respect to problems to come. These include problems of comparative religion, esotericism, spiritualism, and pagan and natural theology, as well as questions of politics, ethics, and revolutionary change. Engagement with these matters did not prevent many moderns from finding their way towards religion, Christian and otherwise, on terms both new and old.

To introduce the term ‘modernism’ into a discussion of the intersections between literature and theology is to risk complicating rather than clarifying the issues at stake. In the first place, modern literature and modern theology are two relatively distinct discourses with different orientations and contexts—and each term is within its own domain highly contested and perhaps even, many would argue, counterproductive. Modernism in theology has its roots in the Enlightenment and in nineteenth-century philosophy and biblical criticism, and in Romantic and Victorian liberal and progressive thought. It draws upon Kant, Hegel, and the higher criticism, and it enters into dialogue with, among other things, Darwinian science and the general high bourgeois culture of its time. However, though the influence of its orientations and engagements persists to this day, many of the towering figures of twentieth-century theology, from Karl Barth to Hans Urs von Balthasar, were not modernists strictly speaking, and were often highly critical of liberal suppositions and methods even where they sometimes drew on or deployed them. Modernism in literature and the arts, by contrast, is an almost purely twentieth-century phenomenon and is to some extent a matter of style and form rather than content and ideas, though it has more ties to theology and more concern with theological issues than literary and cultural critics have often appreciated.

Theological modernism effectively began in nineteenth-century Germany, where theologians such as Schleiermacher and Troeltsch began to perceive that one way out of scholastic and Calvinist aporias and the subsequent dismissal of religion during the Enlightenment lay in Kant's philosophy of religion. This philosophy delineated a clear separation between reason and faith, and it thus opened a space in which the latter could be articulated on a new basis, a basis of immanence, feeling, and contemporary cultural and personal experience. Modernism of this kind went hand in hand with a Hegelian historicizing of the unfolding of spirit and a sense of the providential evolution of divine manifestation towards universal salvation. These affirmations translated, perhaps too readily, into romantic vapours, cheap progressivism, and perennial philosophy, but they helped theology to recover from what many had thought were the devastating blows of eighteenth-century British Enlightenment critique. Furthermore, they also led to a willingness to embrace the surrounding culture and were patient of engagement with the rising cultural prestige of science. This general theological outlook also inspired and informed the higher criticism and new initiatives in textual approaches to Scripture and tradition, the sphere in which modernism in theology bore its most lasting fruit.

From Germany, and building on a strong internal discourse of enlightenment, modernist ideas quickly reached the British intelligentsia, their original source. Among the most prominent expositors of the new and modern point of view was the English Jesuit George Tyrell. Writing to his friend and like-minded colleague Baron von Hugel, Tyrell summarized his position, a useful statement, in brief, of the modern religious point of view:

Hence I am driven to a revolutionary view of dogma. As you know, I distinguish sharply between the Christian revelation and the theology that rationalizes and explains it. The former was the work of the inspired era of origins. It is prophetic in form and sense; it involves an idealized reading of history past and to come. It is, so to say, an inspired construction of things in the interests of religion; a work of inspired imagination, not of reflection and reasoning. It does not develop or change like theology; but is the subject-matter of theology…The whole has a spiritual value as a construction of Time in relation to Eternity. It gives us the world of our religious life. But I do not feel bound to find an independent meaning in each element; or to determine prematurely what elements are of liberal, and what of purely symbolic value—which is the core of historic fact and which of idealization. My faith is in the truth, shadowed by the whole creed; and in the direction it gives to spiritual life—in the Way, the Life and the Truth. (Petre 1920 : 57–8)

The extent to which these views sound conventional or uncontroversial today is the extent to which a generalized modernism was rapidly diffused in British and American culture in the twentieth century and became well established, at least among the intelligentsia, both within and without the Catholic Church.

This diffusion did not occur without resistance. There followed on this nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expansion something of an immediate countermovement towards repression. It was foreshadowed in Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). Pope Leo, believing that a return to a repristinated and reified understanding of scholasticism was the only possible position for a church under political and cultural siege, exhorted the magisterium to ‘restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas’. Some thirty years later, Tyrell was suspended from his ministry and expelled from the Society of Jesus for modernist tendencies, and Pius X in the papal document Pascendi (1907) formally condemned modernism and attempted to make a return to scholasticism the official theology of the Church. (This stance would probably have horrified Thomas himself, who was in many ways the modernist of his day.) This attempt by the papacy to close the door on a widespread and intellectually compelling movement had the ironic effect not only of destroying several great careers and setting Catholic biblical scholarship back by generations but of putting the term ‘modernism’ itself on the general cultural map. The major figures condemned in this document include Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) as well as Tyrell (1861–1909) and von Hugel (1852–1925). As Marianne Thormahlen notes in her introduction to an important recent anthology of essays on the modernist movement in literature, none of these figures made use of the word ‘modernism’ itself in public until after the papal condemnation (Thormahlen 2003 : 124). That condemnation had, however, the unintended consequence of making the term part of the general intellectual commerce of the period.

Eventually, however, modernism's best offspring—the movement its conservative opposition dubbed nouvelle théologie —succeeded just before, during, and after the Second World War in reorienting Catholic intellectual life to a new direction, modern in a somewhat different sense. This theology, developed by such deeply reflective and learned figures as Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and M-D Chenu, arose from a discreet but persistent exploration of Christian texts and traditions with an eye both to their historical context and to their contemporary relevance (Daley 2004). As Danielou describes its challenges, a theology of this kind

must treat God as God—not as an object, but as the Subject par excellence, who reveals himself when and as he will; as a result, it must be penetrated, first of all, with a religious spirit. Second, it must respond to the experiences of the modern mind, and take cognizance of the new dimensions which science and history have given to mind and society. Finally, it must become a concrete attitude before existence—one unified response that engages the whole person, the inner light of a course of action in which the whole of life is engaged. (Cited ibid. 5)

The nouvelle théologie contributed to what was perhaps modernization's most stunning public success: the reform movement culminating in Vatican II. This reform not only ‘purged’ the liturgy and many of the thought forms of the Church of centuries of scholastic elaboration, but opened the path for Catholic theology and biblical criticism to draw on contemporary methods and experience and on philosophical movements from existentialism and hermeneutics to phenomenology and deconstruction.

This was not the whole story, however, for Catholic resistance to these new currents remained important, both within the magisterium and in the pew, and Catholic conservatism in doctrine and morals had from the first a deep cultural impact, not only on the faithful, but on the wider culture as well, creating a conservative profile for the Roman Church still operative today. At the same time, the Catholic understanding of and reaction to this phenomenon influenced a number of the writers of the twentieth century, not always in the direction of dissent. For as we shall see there was something in religious and philosophical modernism—as opposed to modernism in the arts—that seemed to many twentieth-century writers inadequate to the experience of two world wars and a holocaust, and antithetical to the complex, sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes classical, symbolic, imaginative, and restorative energies they sought to reclaim.

Protestant modernism in Britain and America had roughly the same nineteenth-century seedbed as did Roman Catholic modernism: the higher criticism, political liberalism, the rise of science, anticlericalism, and a desire to break down dogmatic reification and moral absolutism and bring Christian belief into better contact with contemporary realities. These assumptions quickly flowed not only into a flourishing biblical scholarship but into the Broad Church and Anglican modernist movements in Britain and into Unitarianism in America. The major figures in Britain—such divines as B. F. Streeter and Dr. Sanday—are now no longer household names, but the positions they held and defended are widely accepted in Christian circles and often the more powerful for being tacitly assumed. Paul Badham ( 1998 : 78), in his useful study of Anglican modernism then and now, defines the still important issues these positions raise in terms of the following axioms:

Belief that the objective existence of God can be shown to be compatible with modern philosophy and science.

Belief that religious experience is foundational for faith and that such experience is part of the common heritage of the world's faiths.

Belief in the reality of life after death understood in terms of the immortality of the soul.

Belief that the divinity of Christ must be expressed in such a way that it is compatible with the equally important doctrine of his humanity and oneness with us and that it genuinely reflects what historical study of the Gospels tells us about Jesus' life and thought.

 In the USA, a German-influenced, broad Unitarianism and the philosophies of religion—Emersonian, idealist, and eventually pragmatic—to which it gives rise were immensely influential in the nineteenth century, though from the first they had their critics. Emily Dickinson, for instance, was able to be acid as well as acute about this tendency.

He preached upon ‘Breadth’ till it argued him narrow— The Broad are too broad to define And of ‘Truth’ until it proclaimed him a Liar— The Truth never flaunted a Sign— Simplicity fled from his counterfeit presence As Gold the Pyrites would shun— What confusion would cover the innocent Jesus To meet so enabled a Man!

This poem captures well the complexities at issue in the reception of modern theological ideas, for while it pokes fun at a so very up-to-date, so very enabled clergyman, it does so in the name of what is also a highly modernist construct: a humane and innocent Jesus upon whom tradition has thrown a false and elaborate overlay, and whose very name serves as a kind of touchstone for simple faith and historical truth.

Within a few years of the papal condemnation of modernism in 1907, the modernist movement in both Catholic and Reformed circles also began to gather steam among the general educated public, accruing a wide range of connotations and implications, both intellectual and cultural. These connotations included what S. M. Hutchens ( 1999 : 1) describes succinctly as ‘a posited end to the assertion of religious dogma as prescriptive public truth’. Great interest at this time followed and continues to follow initiatives in biblical criticism toward stripping away secondary and mythological elements from the faith in favour of a new understanding of its historical manifestations and of a rational though not dismissive reappropriation. The desideratum, as many see it, is to disestablish Christianity and cleanse it not only of the weight of gothic and scholastic mediations and constraining social conventions but of the more fanciful, symbolic, allegorical, and apocalyptic and apocalyptic-messianic interpretations of its truths, even those of Scripture itself. As Hutchens (ibid. 2) also notes, modernism in this sense posits ‘as an epistemological entrance requirement’ that all prior canons of knowledge and method and their condensed symbols be subject to critical reconstruction, though it cannot tell us by what canon this is to be done once these prior canons enter the door.

This positive invocation of a general, across-the-board examination and critique of religion, based on criteria outside the realm of faith, targeted as antiquated and mystified any position smacking of apocalyptic and/or participating in what previous ages had elaborated as a full messianic understanding of the figure of Jesus. Robert Jenson ( 2004 : 12) puts it pungently, if somewhat tendentiously: ‘modernity's great theological project was to suppress apocalyptic, and to make messianism into [mere] guru-worship’. A new understanding of Christianity, it was thought, might arise from this suppression, an understanding based on a progressive sense of history and a submission to scientific criteria. This basis would not leave the church without faith and tradition, but it would value these without the sacrifice of intellectual rigour, scientific advancement, rigorous textual criticism, and radical cultural and political engagement. The figure of Rudolf Bultmann comes to mind here, the New Testament scholar who inaugurated a project of ‘demythologizing’ the Gospels that, as it seems in retrospect, only a dyed-in-the-wool modernist could imagine as possible or desirable.

Bultmann is instructive here, however, in another way, for his religious vision was not confined by exegetical method. He was a profound man of faith, and he was open to and inspired by the extremely rigorous anti-modern theological perspective offered by the work of his younger colleague Karl Barth. Barth, perhaps the most outstanding theologian of the twentieth century, challenged in many ways the liberal political and revisionist predispositions of his time and sought to restore an apocalyptic, engaged, and deeply messianic vision to Christian understanding. To Barth we shall return in a moment. First, however, we must note among the moderns a number of somewhat younger and later figures, including Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, whose base of operations was the USA and whose engagement with the liberal politics and art of the 1930s to the 1960s was, like that of Troeltsch and others before them, founded in a historically critical understanding of Christianity and a strong desire to subject the faith to reasonable revision.

To some extent, two other great twentieth-century theologians were in a qualified way moderns as well: Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, at least in the sense that they were deeply engaged with contemporary culture and politics, somewhat distanced from ecclesiastical structures and orthodoxies, and completely opposed to the idolatrous power of institutions, both state and church. Tillich, who sought a kind of revision of the doctrine of God in terms of the ground of being, saw theology less as a matter of reflection on revelation than as a search for answers to ‘ultimate questions’, while Bonhoeffer's life of sacrificial political engagement drew upon the prophetic capacity of modern liberalism to witness to a gospel sense of discipleship and to a historical Jesus seen as a model for spiritual leadership in the face of evil.

The attenuations of a nineteenth-century religious outlook, however updated, did nonetheless, here as in Catholicism, breed a certain resistance, a resistance with many opposing, profound, and still-ramifying manifestations, including the rise of neo-orthodoxy on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. Granted, Protestant modernism was neither resisted with such institutional force as Roman Catholic modernism (though many refined theologians vigorously rejected it), nor did it win the day in quite so definitive a fashion. From the first, however, it had its dissenters, both from above, so to speak, in the flourishing movement of neo-reformed-orthodoxy around the great, left-leaning, and philosophically sophisticated figure of Karl Barth, and from below in the hotly and passionately held fundamentalism and evangelical fervour of many clergy as well as laity.

The key moment in this shifting current was perhaps the period just before and during the First World War, a period that inaugurated major shifts in the culture of Europe and America in almost every domain. Among other things, very early, in 1914, as Europe began to fall apart, the modern theologian Troeltsch, like many of his colleagues, compromised himself in the eyes of some Christians by supporting the Kaiser's war policies and by moving from the chair of Systematic Theology at Heidelberg to a chair in the History and Philosophy of Civilization in Berlin. Highly critical of Troeltsch's move, the young Barth began to look to Kierkegaard rather than to Kant and Hegel for philosophical inspiration and to adumbrate a radical apocalyptic vision of Christianity as the encounter with what today, in a different language and context, might be called the tout autre . In 1919 he published his controversial and widely read commentary on Romans. Its attack on liberal theology for failing to provide a sharp enough critique of culture and politics to mount a serious resistance to imperialism seemed prophetic when the so-called ‘Faith Movement of German Christians’ showed itself ready to embrace Nazism, and the official church leadership in Germany seemed to lack either ethical or theological resources to combat this collusion.

The youthful Barth, rusticated for a time in his early years to the leadership of a parish made up largely of the industrial poor, was struck by the impotence of liberal theology in addressing the lives of his parishioners, and had to conclude that the bourgeois religious perspective in which he had been trained offered them very little, and that his pastoral responsibility must carry him beyond its terms and horizons (Jenson 2004 : 5). Giving up definitively on natural theology and on the possibility of a happy collaboration between Christian understanding and contemporary social and political culture, Barth then began the articulation of a theology based strictly on ‘vertical’ revelation from above and not on the surrounding dominant culture, whether enlightened or not.

The first initiative here was the commentary on Romans, a publication which instantly made him a celebrity. He then gathered about him a movement of sorts, drawing the older Bultmann in its train and including Emil Brunner. The group published a journal, Zwischen den Zeiten , defining their moment in history as one of crisis, a moment, as the journal's title indicates, seen as a kind of suspension, ‘between the times’. Robert Jenson (ibid. 6) captures the theological and indeed the aesthetic energies of this movement well:

For what is there zwischen den Zeiten , between the times? Theologically, there is that dimensionless perch between time and eternity, between death and resurrection. Culturally, there is the breathless moment between deconstruction of the established grasp of reality and the gift of a new one—the moment of Cézanne's Bathers . Politically, there is revolution. And in Germany all of these were there at once.

Barth's own work emerged from this moment, and although it later modulated into a somewhat less apocalyptic exposition as he attempted to give narrative and Christological content to the encounter between time and eternity, it was a modulation with an edge. It gave him a critical purchase on both liberal religion and contemporary politics, helping to sustain his profound resistance to National Socialism.

Barth's critique of nineteenth-century assumptions about religion and theology is still widely influential today, though less so perhaps in the pew than in the study. Even those whose perspective remained in some sense more hospitable to the surrounding culture and more engaged with natural theology than his have had to reckon with his cogent analyses. Tillich and Bonhoeffer, for instance, emerging from the same experiences of the trauma of war and holocaust that Barth saw coming, while both loosely speaking ‘modern’ in their move away from ecclesiastical structures and into direct engagement with the world (though both were also profoundly pessimistic and existential, rather than progressivist and scientific in orientation), nevertheless developed their thought very much in conversation with Barth and they shared his personal and principled opposition to the reigning paradigms in society and politics, whether liberal or conservative.

Tillich, for instance, though often contrasted to Barth, saw his theology as in part constructed to ‘answer’ the Barthian call. As late as 1963, in a set of lectures for the general public, he wrote a moving statement that weaves together a new theological vision with a deep suspicion of progressivism and social planning:

Today we have to resist the meaningless ‘forwardism’ determining our inner and outer experience. Most of us can offer this resistance only as victims of the structures of our times. But the scars received in our lives may be the basis for sensitive speaking…But even then we will have to keep on resisting—against control by others, against ‘management’ of persons, against all abuse of men and women. This certainly includes the abuse of forcing them into their own salvation. (Tillich 1996 : 61)

Thus although modernist hopes and perspectives informed and inspired these theologians, they were in various ways as critical of a hyper-rationalized modern identification with the powers that be as was Barth himself. What Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and the leading figures of Vatican II shared, however—and shared in distinction from many of their postmodern heirs—was a sense that it is possible to cleanse Christian tradition of secondary formations and to return to a kernel, a bedrock, a bottom line to be discerned in Scripture and history upon which theological vision may be built anew.

It is interesting to note that none of the figures mentioned so far tackled directly or commented in an extended way on the two major and growing challenges to religious faith in this period: the social theory of Karl Marx and the psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The Marxist view of religion as the ‘opium of the people’ and the Freudian view of it as a form of mystification and unconscious projection gained instant attention and growing currency among the intelligentsia throughout the period, and so as time went on did Jung's association of the sense of divinity with a transpersonal collective unconscious. These opinions influenced—though they did not entirely captivate—many artists and writers. Indeed it might be argued that the most important theological or rather atheological statements of the modern period were Marx's Critique of the German Ideology (1846), Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930), and Jung's Answer to Job (1952). Each of these offers a sharp critique of religion, and each is scornful of theological mystification, but each also arises from within a Jewish and Christian discourse and can hardly be conceived without the valorization of social justice and personal self-examination found in these faith traditions. Each was also eventually to spawn intense engagements from theologians and religious writers in the postmodern period.

Whatever its limitations, the impact of the modernist movement in theology on the literary and artistic modernism of the twentieth century was more profound than many later critics have supposed. It was not, however, monolithic nor was a modern religious outlook always the general theological orientation of choice for modern writers and artists. In the first, place, as we have seen, by the time at which the literary figures we call moderns were making their contributions, not only had the Roman Catholic Church formally condemned the modernist movement, but such major theologians of the period as Barth were already to some extent reacting against or moving beyond modern theology strictu dictu . And although their own innovations were placing them firmly in the camp of the avant-garde, the literary moderns were reacting against some modernizing tendencies in religion and culture, even when they regarded these as inevitable and in some respects liberating. Among other things, as I have said, modernism in the arts is primarily a matter of form, rather than content, of style rather than of thought per se, though form carries, for moderns in particular, its own freight of meaning: philosophical, political and theological.

At a deeper level, however, it must be admitted that the modernist ethos in religion was in many respects counter to the interests of art and artists. Demythologizing? The reduction of complex symbols into linear propositions? The cleansing and rectifying of tradition? A sense of the datedness of the past and its lack of pertinence to the present? Optimism about the forward march of progress? Rejection of apocalyptic sensibility? Philosophical idealism? Pure science? None of these gestures or positions or projects entirely suited the book of a modern writer, certainly not a Joyce, a Pound, a Yeats, or an Eliot, especially not after the traumas and dislocations of the First and then the Second World Wars. For in driving a wedge between the rational and the mythological, the appeal of the new and the beauty of the old, meaning and symbol, personal feeling and scientific consensus, modern theology left little space for either art or genuine engagement with the darkness of human suffering and mass-manufactured death and destruction.

Under the pressure of their need for both aesthetic pertinence and political engagement, many artists and writers resisted not only the absolutisms, moral and political, of various forms of clerical and cultural ancien régime , but the equally barren vistas of the up-to-date liberal response. This response seemed to offer only a denatured and pre-programmed agenda that threatened to ignore or elide political and personal breakdown, to cut itself off from classical and pagan sources of inspiration and renewal, and to flatten out all difference into an unending and sterile same. At the same time, much in a generalized and widely diffused kind of ‘modern thinking’ continued to have its appeal to men and women of letters, due among other things to the critical historicism of its approach to biblical texts, its scholarly approach to other cultures, its potential universalism and hospitality to Bohemian and oppositional lifestyles, and above all to a deep and relatively unconstrained exploration of the experience and meaning of sex. Thus, the relationship of most modern artists to modern theology and religion was and remained ambivalent and hard to determine.

Contributing to the complexity of the issues at stake was a further problem. For though the term ‘modern’ occasionally occurs in nineteenth-century literature and more often in twentieth-century novels, where it is a kind of canting jargon—often used tongue in cheek—for all that is trendy and outré in art and morals, modernism in literary studies is largely the sober retrospective construct of critics of the second half of the twentieth century. Its profile is drawn by those readers for the most part tuned and sympathetic to the new twentieth-century aesthetic and trying to measure a major change in sensibility (cf. Thormahlen 2003 : 124). This change was immediately and intuitively apparent to its first audience, but it was defined more precisely by later critics, for whom modernism was a largely formal innovation entailing a family of features, among them the writing of self-consciously difficult and demanding texts, the representation of sex and violence as constituent elements of human life, a deployment of high learning in a vernacular idiom, linguistic experimentation and the breaking of a certain conventional decorum in social, literary, and religious domains.

Most of these later critics, from F. R. Leavis to Malcolm Bradbury, approached modernism with discernment and respect, but they were often tone deaf to its religious roots, seeing its provocative and impious discourse as arising from nothing more than a kind of enlightened secularism. As we shall see, this was often not the case, and the range of religious reference and dimension of spirituality inherent in modern art seems to have often eluded these otherwise very acute readers. Children of a later, highly secularized cultural moment, they were subject to the notion that religion can be neatly hived off from philosophy and art—indeed that these perhaps supersede it—a view not unrelated to nineteenth-century aestheticism. Literary modernism as usually defined in the critical literature is thus not only different from theological modernism but is often defined in ways divorced from religious issues altogether.

We can now see, pace these critics, that modern artists—like the ‘terribly modern’ young things who liked, bought, and indeed flaunted their work—were probably more aware of the serious theological and religious issues underlying this new art and aesthetic, and more engaged with these matters, than the literary and cultural critics who followed them. Certainly this is true of the major figures of the period. T. S. Eliot is the most obvious example here, at once a major poet, an innovative critic, and, in his mature years, a practising Christian of great theological and philosophical subtlety and sophistication. Not only did Eliot deal with Christian themes in his work, but he made a direct contribution to Christian thought both through his participation in the Anglican Lambeth Conference and through his work on the committee for a revised translation of the New Testament.

Equally engaged, though from a dissenting point of view, were such writers as Yeats, Pound, and Joyce. The latter, for instance, was explicit about the difficulty and yet necessity he found in escaping the constraints of ethnicity, traditional faith, and identification with a single cultural heritage and social location. ‘When the soul of man is born in this country,’ says his young Irish hero in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets’ (Joyce 1991 : 206). At the same time, it must be said that Joyce's disengagement from Catholicism and Irish politics and his movement toward a kind of gnosticism and pan-European cosmopolitanism emerged not from some merely rationalist and secular set of assumptions and presuppositions, but from a highly charged and consciously developed countervailing spiritual vision, one still informed and illuminated by the past. Among other things, his profound appreciation of the tension between Hebraism and Hellenism—to borrow the phrase of the great nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold—emerged from and depended on this spiritually informed vision.

(It might be noted here that a great many manifestations of modern sensibility, though not all, are closely tied to a persistent strain of gnosticism in Western culture, where gnosticism is defined as general orientation toward a dualistic theology according to which orthodox institutional religion is no more than a mask for a profoundly dark human situation, caught between an ideal notion of divinity and an equally strong sense of moral and ethical chaos. This gnosticism is explicit in the work of Lawrence Durrell, who is well aware of its historical roots, its theological implications, and its possible intersections with the new psychologies of Freud and Jung; and it marks the sensibility of, among others, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer as well, most extravagantly in the latter's neglected magnum opus, Ancient Evenings .)

Yeats is yet another modern poet who departed from Christianity, but not in order to move towards a modern, rational liberalism in religion, but rather to embrace (though perhaps never quite literally) an esotericism the extent of which continues to astound the more secular of his critics and readers. His poem ‘Vacillations’, among his most important, ends with an apostrophe to Baron von Hugel, the Christian modernist noted above. It concludes:

Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity? The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb, Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come, Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once Had scooped out pharaoh's mummy. I—though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the tomb—play a pre-destined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said? So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.

 As his inclusion of pharaoh's mummy in this list of miracles might signal, Yeats was more interested in the belief in a world of spirits hidden from and more ‘real’ than obvious earthly phenomena, spirits that may be invoked to intervene actively in human life, than he was in orthodox Christianity, though he was insistent that these forms of spirituality were by no means as far apart as many thought. His interest in the occult, like that of many of his contemporaries, was in part a provocative gesture, in part a way of courting the muse, and in part a genuine spiritual commitment. The fine line between and among these motives is traced with great finesse and theological sophistication by several recent scholars (Helmling 1988 ; Longenbach 1988 ). In general, however, the increasingly high level of scholarship in matters cultural, some small but growing measure of direct contact with other traditions once thought to be entirely mystified and inscrutable, and a deeper philosophical and historical sophistication prevented many modern writers from falling into the sillier forms of spiritualism.

Ezra Pound, another dissenter from the modern Christian consensus, was also deeply engaged with religious and spiritual issues, though he did not think theologically in quite the way that Joyce or Eliot did. He shared with Yeats an interest in the occult and in gnosticism (Longenbach 1988 ; Miyaki 1991), but his apprehension of these was tempered by a finer sense of cultural mediation and a more honed aesthetic sensibility than many others could deploy. (The greatest of his contemporaries recognized in Pound this superior sensibility, and were the more mortified by the curious intellectual and ethical failures of his later political and social vision.) Indeed, Pound stands as primus inter pares among modernism's several great heretics, figures whose opposition to orthodox Christianity arose neither from liberal revisionism nor from secular materialism, but from a deep and impassioned concern with matters spiritual and an engaged critique of the attenuated forms Christian life and belief had come in their time to take.

Not every modern artist departed from Christianity or from traditional forms of representation in such extreme directions, either in terms of beliefs or aesthetics. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, after many experiments in both painting and writing involving both form and content, returned not only to traditional religious constructs but to portraiture and to the conventional structure of the novel. Eliot, having written the echt-modern poem The Waste Land , perhaps the greatest single achievement of modern poetry, took up dramatic lyric, the popular theatre, and something resembling more the meditative devotional poetry of the past than the innovative forms of the modernist sense of the future. Joyce, Pound, and Woolf, to mention only a few other representative figures, continued to be committed to a break with conventional form as well as content, but their later work moved, in the judgement of many, very close to the edge of unintelligibility and seemed to approach a cul-de-sac, aesthetically, personally, and to some extent ethically as well. So, at least, in the case of Woolf, who ended her life, and Pound, whose tragic investment in Italian fascism brought not only his reputation but in many respects his poetry to grief.

Thus many major figures in the modern arts, while avant-garde in orientation, were far more antagonistic to modernist revisionism in religion than might be supposed—or at least to modernist revisionism in its more reductive and unimaginative forms. Indeed, a surprising number of these figures remained or became close to traditional pre-modern forms of religious belief and practice. The Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, and/or converts Eliot, Stevens (late in life), David Jones, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Paul Claudel all come to mind here, a list to which we must add the names of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, the eccentric but interesting Charles Williams, and the great American modern literary critic Cleanth Brooks. A certain nostalgie du cloître may be observed even in figures who did not formally embrace high Anglicanism or Catholicism, such as Hilda Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and Henry James. In the reformed tradition there was among others Marianne Moore, whose letters reveal not only a regular churchgoer but in many respects a deeply Protestant sensibility.

An important context for both the orthodox and the unorthodox theologies of modern artists remains to be discussed: the phenomenon the French historian of letters and cultural critic Raymond Schwab ( 1984 ) long ago identified as ‘the oriental renaissance’, an influx of Eastern philosophy and religion into European and American culture beginning in the nineteenth century and growing exponentially in importance today. For during the modern period, and with a depth of effect that we are only beginning to measure, the discovery of the huge, relatively unknown and unmapped ‘old worlds’ of Indic and Chinese culture and religion (to which we might add the ‘primitive’ world of African rhythms and forms) not only challenged European hegemony over religious truth but profoundly relativized the context in which that truth was understood and pursued. While arrogance and colonial myopia often dominated the reception of this infusion of new visions and perspectives, the effect of this intercultural contact was profoundly transforming, both in religion and in the arts.

Even in the very early modern period, many theologians and divines in Britain already wrote in the light of this oriental renaissance. The eminent Rowland Williams began his career with a major study on Christianity and Hinduism, while such equally prominent figures as B. H. Streeter and A. C. Bouquet took up the relatively new term ‘comparative religion’ and advocated its pursuit. These initiatives were largely based on a model of progressive revelation that makes Christ the fulfilment of all prior forms of religious understanding. Though this model now seems inadequate, the very gesture of placing, say, early Buddhism and the early church on the same plane, if only for purposes of comparison, was radical in both its immediate and long-term implications. This gesture was informed by the work of, among others, the great scholar of oriental texts and languages Max Muller and the early mythographer Sir James G. Frazer. Muller's remarks on these new perspectives capture both their potential and their limitations:

If we have once learned to see in the exclusive religion of the Jews a preparation of what was to be the all-embracing religion of humanity, we shall feel much less difficulty in recognizing, in the mazes of other religions, a hidden purpose; a wandering in the desert, it may be, but a preparation also for the land of promise. (Muller 1872 : 23; cited in C. Kearns 1987 : 132–3)

 The effect of this oriental renaissance appears even more extensive in literature, though here again the new vistas opened out by comparative culture and religion are explored as much from a need to escape from modernist reductions as to harvest the scholarly, philosophical, and theological fruits of openings to the East. Yeats was intrigued by Eastern traditions and collaborated on a translation of Patanjali's yoga sutras, which was to become an influential text among the American intelligentsia in the next century. T. S. Eliot was long engaged with Buddhism and Hinduism, among other things for its refinement of meditative technique and its validation, though with great critical and philosophical sophistication, of mystical experience (ibid.). Ezra Pound not only rendered a number of classics of Chinese religion and literature into English, but was deeply steadied and guided by his understanding of Confucianism (G. Kearns 1980 ).

Eliot himself best understood the cultural possibilities and tensions arising from liberal, enlightened modernism in religion. Though the conservative positions on these issues he came to embrace displeased the politically correct both then and now—‘how unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot | with his garb of clerical cut’, to quote his own spoof—his analysis of the issues at stake was without peer. His key critical terms, ‘dissociation of sensibility’, ‘the objective correlative’, and ‘tradition and the individual talent’ all arise form modernist concerns. The first of these points to an inability to feel thought on the pulse and is for Eliot the result of a modern divorce between sense and sensibility. The second represents a modernist attempt to bridge the subjective world of philosophical idealism, private experience, and esoteric knowledge, with what he calls ‘open wisdom’ and the new realism of science. The third, and the rich discourse of tradition in Eliot's work to which it leads, is perhaps the most productive of his critical concepts, arising from his study of American philosophers William James and Josiah Royce. Royce in particular, though Eliot could critique his philosophical arguments with a rapier mind honed on the finer work of F. H. Bradley, helped move him towards an understanding of cultural hermeneutics as spiritual practice.

Eliot saw in the initial moment or insight of artistic inspiration a necessarily heterodox impulse, an impulse in the best work then classically chastened and disciplined into an orthodoxy of both form and content that re-envisions the tradition even as it carries that tradition forward. (This is an understanding remarkably similar to that of Wallace Stevens, whose great poem ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ is in part a meditation, less resolved than acutely stated, on the problem of revelation and interpretation.) He fully took on board the Kantian and later the proto-phenomenological and deconstructive critique of Thomism in philosophy, the importance of the higher criticism in biblical studies and the appeal of cultural relativism when faced with, among other things, the profound influx of Eastern philosophy and religion into the Western cultural matrix. Alert to the modern heresies of esotericism, gnosticism, and paganism in his own work as well as that of his contemporaries, Eliot also understood that to meet with an adequate poetics and ethics the deep questions and traumas of contemporary life, not to mention the dislocations of a debased sexuality, required stronger medicine than a simple nineteenth-century Hegelian and idealist revisionism.

In 1927, after a long period of interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, Eliot joined the Anglican Church. He did so to some extent for practical or more precisely for pragmatic reasons in the philosophical sense. To ‘become’ a Buddhist, he thought, was to require of himself a change in mental orientation that would take him too far from his own language and culture to bear fruit (Kearns 1987 : 131–59). In reflecting on this decision, Eliot articulated well the journey he himself had traced through both the appeal and the critique of modern thought to an understanding of the need for some traditional religious framework in which to carry on spiritual practice. ‘The difficult discipline’, he writes, ‘is the discipline and training of emotion; this the modern world has great need of; so great that it hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is only attainable through dogmatic religion’ (Eliot 1930 : 156).

This return to orthodoxy, though orthodoxy far more relativized, nuanced, and deconstructive in philosophical location than might appear, must, however, be counterbalanced by a recognition of its roots in Eliot's profoundly modernist project, both in literature and theology. In his early years, he put this project in terms that almost any modern theologian or writer could endorse: ‘The life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or lesser extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from one or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them’ (cited in Kearns 1987 : 85).

Thus while a literary and critical modernism seems on the surface independent of and at times oblivious to theological modernism, the modernist stances taken by major twentieth-century artists and writers raise theological issues and concerns with which they are very much engaged. These issues are incarnated in their stylistic and formal innovations as well as in their range of interests, both often sensitive as well as challenging to conservative and orthodox understandings of Christianity and prescient with respect to problems to come. These include problems of comparative religion, esotericism, spiritualism, and pagan and natural theology as well as questions of politics, ethics, and revolutionary change. Engagement with these matters did not, moreover, prevent many moderns from finding their way towards religion, Christian and otherwise, on terms both new and old.

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Comparative Print Culture and Alternative Literary Modernities: A Critical Introduction to Frameworks and Case Studies

  • First Online: 08 April 2020

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  • Rasoul Aliakbari 4  

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This introductory chapter draws on several fields including comparative literary studies, postcolonial book history, and literary, multiple, and alternative modernities in order to conceptualize comparative print culture for the study of alternative literary modernities . The former term, as this chapter designates it, concerns a range of scholarly practices that discover, examine, document, contextualize, and/or historicize various printed materials and their reproduction, circulation, and uses across genres, languages, media, and technologies, all within a comparative orientation. Additionally, the present essay demonstrates the latter, alternative literary modernities, mostly by highlighting the distinct ways in which literary and cultural print modernities outside Europe evince the repurposing of European systems and cultures of print, further deconstructing their perceived universality. This chapter accomplishes the above-said goals by describing, contesting, and/or contextualizing previous exemplary as well as forthcoming scholarly works.

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Also, see her “Can the Subaltern Speak?” for a critique of postcolonialism as a regulation of the nuances and complexities of cultural practices in the South in conformity with fixed, reductive North American academic models of postcolonial study. Moreover, by sketching alternative sites of literary modernity and print culture, this anthology attempts to provide responses, albeit partial ones, to the demonstration in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” of the inaudibility of voices on the periphery.

Even though his work does not concern China or print culture, Hamid Dabashi does outline an account of an endogenous modernity; see his The World of Persian Literary Humanism .

For another study of multiple modernities, see Jenny Kwok Wah Lau’s Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia ( 2002 ). This anthology explores East Asia’s multiple modernities as locale-based reactions in which “each society mobilizes its own cultural resources, less for ‘coping’ with Westernization, as the West may view it, than for a double negotiation between social and cultural modernity” (9). Lau’s work also highlights the transregional dialectics underlying the formation of cultures of modernity in the area, amongst other things ( 2002 , 3), debunks the view of the formation of East Asian culture as a one-way response to the “West” ( 2002 , 7), and demonstrates that the cinematic portrayals of women in traditional and popular cinema of Hong Kong are more progressive than their counterparts in artistic films ( 2002 , 8–9).

For an account of the origins of the term alternative modernity in anthropology, see Kelly, “Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to ‘Modernity’” ( 2002 ).

While this volume features contributions on China and Japan, it is worth highlighting the continuing paucity of scholarly material on the early print culture of East Asia. For instance, Japan enjoyed a vibrant woodblock printing culture in the Edo period, while, as another example, metal movable typography was employed in Korea during the fourteenth century. For more on these early print cultures, see Kornicki, The Book in Japan ( 2001 ); Berry, Japan in Print ( 2006 ); and Kamei-Dyche, “The History of Books and Print Culture in Japan” ( 2011 ); as well as Kim, “Literary Production, Circulating Libraries, and Private Publishing” ( 2004 ); and McKillop, “The History of the Book in Korea” ( 2013 ).

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———. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History of an Idea , ed. Rosalind C. Morris, 21–80. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Aliakbari, R. (2020). Comparative Print Culture and Alternative Literary Modernities: A Critical Introduction to Frameworks and Case Studies. In: Aliakbari, R. (eds) Comparative Print Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36891-3_1

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