This lesson plan for a literature and religion class draws on Jamie Callison’s monograph ‘Modernism and Religion’, H.D.’s poem ‘Helen in Egypt’ and David Jones’s poem ‘The Grail Mass’ to explore key features of a secular outlook and the challenge modernist poetry posed for it..

This lesson plan for a literature and religion class uses Jamie Callison’s monograph ‘Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy’, Anthony Domestic’s article on ‘‘The Twice-Broken World: Karl Barth, T. S. Eliot, and the Poetics of Christian Revelation’, and T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ to explore the different dimensions of lit…[Read more]

This lesson plan is for a course on literature and religion. It is uses Jamie Callison’s monograph ‘Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy’ and H.D.’s ‘Trilogy’ to encourage students to reflect on changing attitudes to vision in a secular age and the impact of these changes on literary representations.

This chapter situates H.D.’s life and work within shifting legal, philosophical and social understandings of marriage. Beginning with H.D.’s account of her own divorce, the essay explains the rationale for and the resistance to the liberalization of divorce laws in England during the interwar period. It then looks at how thinkers such as Charles…[Read more]

This chapter uses the example of the twentieth-century retreat movement to challenge several assumptions about the relationship between secularisation and literary modernism. It shows how institutional religions – in this case of the Church of England – responded to processes of religious change at work through the first half of the twentieth cen…[Read more]

This essay affords the first extensive reading of T.S. Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s ‘Appearance and Reality.’ I draw attention to a shift in Eliot’s way of doing philosophy over the course of his year at Merton College, Oxford, 1914-1915; a shift that had consequences for the ways in which Eliot read or re-read Bradley. Drawing on Heathe…[Read more]

Outlining an alternative trajectory for modernist spirituality to that traced in Pericles Lewis’s ‘Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel’ (2010), I argue that modernist religious thought, far from playing heir to the long march of secularization, was in fact conditioned by a late-nineteenth-century cultural crisis that issued in a range o…[Read more]

Using archival resources, I outline T. S. Eliot’s fascination with the porous borders between science and religion. I show how the notion of a dissociated consciousness developed by the French psychologist Pierre Janet informed the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, and how Janet’s idea, repackaged as the subliminal mind and used by psychologists of…[Read more]

Much recent critical interest in the relationship between modernism and religion has concerned itself with the occult, spiritualism and theosophy as opposed to institutional religion, relying on an implicit analogy between the experimental in religion and the experimental in art. I argue that considering Christianity to be antithetical to…[Read more]

Recent critical discussion has suggested that cultural modernism took its impetus from a rallying cry against the Vatican’s condemnation of theological modernism in 1907. As a counterpoint to this position, I trace the intra-Catholic counter-reaction to the bull—a reaction that continued to explore issues important to modernity while steering cle…[Read more]

The unnoticed parallel in question is the modified final refrain of the ‘Agnus Dei’: ‘Grant us thy peace’ as translated in the ‘Book of Common Prayer’, which is replicated in Simeon’s repeated ‘Grant us thy peace’ in the poem under discussion. In the note, I briefly explain what leads us to look for this additional liturgical text, the context for…[Read more]