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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
  • Edited by Suzanne Hobson, Andrew Radford
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 October 2023
    Print publication:
    31 January 2023
  • 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.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London, Andrew Radford, University of Glasgow
  • Book:
    The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    20 October 2023
    Print publication:
    31 January 2023, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    THIS COMPANION APPROACHES cultural modernism’s abiding interest in myth and religion with a view to reframing and diversifying the research field’s current concerns, parameters and objects of scrutiny. Our contributors variously examine the aesthetic, publishing, technological and philosophical trends that shaped debates about modes of individual and communal spiritual experience from the 1890s to the 1940s and beyond. We prioritise the variability and specificity of modernist spiritualities, as well as the shifting standpoints that modernist figures have occupied in relation to theological creeds, imagery, practices and organisations. The Companion contributes to what we see as a welcome and timely trend in studies of the cultural, philosophical and aesthetic category of modernism – one that directs scholarly attention to how primary authors were, to differing degrees, ‘god-haunted’, exploring the ‘gap in being’ between the immanent and a transcendent actuality. By guiding the critical conversation into more inventive channels, the essays address modernist religion/s as a continuing event, a condition of possibility, a fund of creative ‘provocation and inspiration’ that ‘refuses consistency and homogenization’.

    Modernist studies has been comparatively slow to account for religion as a constitutive part of the ‘modernity’ to which its key texts refer. Or, to put this another way, the modernity with which modernism is imbricated has often been assumed to be a secular modernity, an age in which religion is an option but by no means a given and, in many circumstances, a difficult option to embrace. This is not to say that earlier studies have ignored the significance of myth and religion to writers such as T. S. Eliot or H.D. or that they have overlooked the presence of religious texts and practices in modernism altogether. But many of these accounts have left unchallenged the supposed paradox that a secular age should produce a literature in which religion and spirituality feature prominently, a paradox made more acute if modernism is treated in its ‘strong’ form as an experimental literature representative of its times. In some instances modernist religions are presented as the idiosyncratic concerns of individuals or of loose groups of writers who set themselves explicitly against modernity understood to be a spiritual and/or cultural vacuum.

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