Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture

Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture
Author: Suzanne Hobson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2022-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192846477

This volume offers a new account of the relationship between literary and secularist scenes of writing in interwar Britain. Organized secularism has sometimes been seen as a phenomenon that lived and died with the nineteenth century. But associations such as the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association survived into the twentieth and found new purpose in the promotion and publishing of serious literature. This book assembles a group of literary figures whose work was recommended as being of particular interest to the unbelieving readership targeted by these organisations. Some, including Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, Naomi Mitchison, and K.S. Bhat, were members or friends of the R.P.A.; others, such as Mary Butts, were sceptical but nonetheless registered its importance in their work; a third group, including D.H. Lawrence and George Moore, wrote in ways seen as sympathetic to the Rationalist cause. All of these writers produced fiction that was experimental in form and, though few of them could be described as modernist, they shared with modernist writers a will to innovate. This book explores how Rationalist ideas were adapted and transformed by these experiments, focusing in particular on the modifications required to accommodate the strong mode of unbelief associated with British secularism to the notional mode of belief usually solicited by fiction. Whereas modernism is often understood as the literature for a secular age, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture looks elsewhere to find a literature that draws more directly on secularism for its aesthetics and its ethics.

The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology

The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology
Author: Charles Andrews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2024-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350362042

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

Mary Butts

Mary Butts
Author: Joel Hawkes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2024-04-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501380729

A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight-with a feminist focus-into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author. Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres-writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts's experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments-a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight's move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these. This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters range between Butts's writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?

History of Intellectual Culture 2/2023

History of Intellectual Culture 2/2023
Author: Charlotte A. Lerg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2023-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3111078035

The second issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) dedicates a thematic section to modes of publication. This volume addresses recent advances in publication studies and stresses the cultural formation of knowledge. By exploring and analyzing layers of presenting, sharing, and circulating knowledge, we invite readers to critically engage with questions of media uses and publishing practices and structures, both historically and in our contemporary digital age. The articles in this volume attest to the great variety of publication modes and perspectives, from the potential and limits of digitizing newspapers such as the New York Times to questions of positionality in building and using Wikipedia, from translation policies and female participation to the genre of university histories.

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
Author: Suzanne Hobson
Publisher: Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Modernism (Literature)
ISBN: 9781474494786

Presents authoritative analyses of the religious terrain of the modernist 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. Suzanne Hobson is Reader in 20th Century Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns (2022), Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-60 (2011) and co-editor of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (2010). Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has recently published a critical edition of Marie Corelli's occult bestseller A Romance of Two Worlds (Edinburgh University Press 2019). He is also the co-editor of several volumes, including British Experimental Women's Fiction, 1945-1975: Slipping Through the Labels (2021) and The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875-1947 (2018).

A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War

A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War
Author: Tim Dayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 749
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108593879

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modernism, a still-powerful traditional culture, and a variety of cultural and social forces that interacted with and influenced them. Including genre studies, focused analyses of important wartime movements and groups, and broad historical assessments of the significance of the war as prosecuted by the United States on the world stage, this book presents original essays defining the state of scholarship on the American culture of the First World War.

Love's Knowledge

Love's Knowledge
Author: Martha C. Nussbaum
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 434
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780195074857

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.

Religion and Modernity

Religion and Modernity
Author: Detlef Pollack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198801661

This is not a book that provides a new integrated theory of religious change in modern societies, but rather one that develops theoretical elements that contribute to the understanding of some contemporary religious developments. Most of the approaches in sociology of religion are prone to emphasize either processes of religious decline or of religious upswing. For example, secularization theory usually includes a couple of relevant factors--such as functional differentiation, economic affluence or social equality--in order to account for religious change. However, the result of such a theory's empirical analyses seems to be certain in advance, namely that the social relevance of religion is decreasing. In contrast, the religious market model devised by sociologists of religion in the US is inclined to detect everywhere processes of religious upsurge. Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison avoids a purely theoretically based perspective on religious changes. For this reason, Detlef Pollack and Gergely Rosta do not begin with theoretical propositions but with questions. The authors raise the question of how the social significance of religion in its various facets has changed in modern societies, and explain what factors and conditions have contributed to these changes.

Pedophiles and Priests

Pedophiles and Priests
Author: Philip Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2001-08-30
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0195145976

If we can believe the six o'clock news, there has been an epidemic of sexual abuse among the clergy, and especially among the Roman Catholic clergy. This study looks at the entire history of this mushrooming scandal, from the first rumblings to the explosion of headlines. -- Provided by publisher.