IT WOULD BE easy – if it weren’t tricky – to connect Nightwood to Christian texts. Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel is salient with religious imagery, symbolism and rhetoric. It frequently turns to religion and faith, and for some critics it even reads like some kind (admittedly a very unorthodox kind) of Christian parable. And yet it is also and so very clearly a heretical, blasphemous novel, a text, as Daniela Caselli puts it, mixing understatement with Barnesian excess, ‘not untouched by the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the obscene’. Nightwood is not only irreverent but it is also a dense and slippery work, a work which resists productive meaning, prioritises surface over depth, and which therefore refuses any one reading – let alone a ‘Christian’ reading. Nightwood, in case it needs saying, is not a Christian text. This is not what I’d like to suggest here, nor is it to read Barnes’s novel through the prism of Christian texts, finding similarities and differences along the way. What I’d like to do, rather, is read Nightwood and the fascinating characters that populate its world with some late antique and Byzantine Christian texts and the unlikely saints that these texts commemorate.

Why Byzantine? It has, of course, been common and natural for those interested in modern literature and religion to look back to earlier (and early) religious texts. Those within British and North American modernism have customarily looked to Western religious tales and sources. But what if we were to look eastwards and bring into our discussion of anglophone modernism, religion and myth texts of a different culture, geography and language? What would happen to our reading of Nightwood – and to our reading of modernism and religion more broadly – if we ventured towards Byzantium? What might this spatial and vertical expansion yield? What new unorthodox readings?

The texts I will be discussing alongside Nightwood are ‘Byzantine’ in the historical sense that they were written and spread within the Byzantine Empire, founded in 330 ce and taken over by the Ottomans in 1453. They are ‘Byzantine’ in the other sense of the term, too.

E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot all engaged in their critical and creative works with Edwardian liberalism: with the reformist policies of the Liberal Party in England (which came to power in 1905), with the New Liberal ideas on which these policies were based, but also and more broadly with the much older philosophical and political outlook of liberalism. The works and theories of these early modernists were written in direct response to liberal ideas old and new, with even anti-liberal ‘classical’ modernists such as Hulme and Eliot embracing fundamental liberal values (while of course rejecting many others). A consideration of Forster’s short story ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ (1904), Ford’s 1912 poem ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’, Hulme’s essays in The Commentator (1911–12), and Eliot’s programmatic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) shows how, much as with many other contradictory facets of literary modernism, the relationship of modernism to liberalism was close, uneasy, and foundational.

The history of literature has long been viewed in its relationship to politics. For much of the twentieth century, we were schooled to find the politics of literature not in its acknowledged commitments but as lying deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. The Introduction to the volume, as well as offering succinct summaries of the eighteen essays that make it up, calls for attending to literature’s political surfaces: to recognise that twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, and events, that many were activists for or against them, and that literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped, and clashed. Taking its cue from Toni Morrison’s unapologetic mixing of commitment and literature in her 1973 Foreword to Sula, the Introduction argues that several works by twentieth-century individuals were political in specific, open, and direct ways. This is of course not to say that these writers did not question literature’s relationship to politics, nor that they didn’t quiz literature’s ability to effect politics.