Angels Of Modernism

The angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures. This book uses the angel to explore the relations between modernist literature and early twentieth-century debates over the secular and/or religious character of the modern age.

Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse stages an encounter between ‘Modernism and Christianity’ and ‘Apocalypse Studies’. Its nineteen contributions outline a distinct interdisciplinary field of study.

Exploring the intersection of religious sensibility and creativity in the poetry and prose of the American modernist writer, H.D., this volume explores the nexus of the religious, the visionary, the creative and the material. Drawing on original archival research and analyses of newly published and currently unpublished writings by H.D., Elizabeth Anderson shows how the poet's work is informed by a range of religious traditions, from the complexities and contradictions of Moravian Christianity to a wide range of esoteric beliefs and practices. H.D and Modernist Religious Imagination brings H.D.'s texts into dialogue with the French theorist Hélène Cixous, whose attention to writing, imagination and the sacred has been a neglected, but rich, critical and theological resource. In analysing the connection both writers craft between the sacred, the material and the creative, this study makes a thoroughly original contribution to the emerging scholarly conversation on modernism and religion, and the debate on the inter-relation of the spiritual and the material within the interdisciplinary field of literature and religion.

The first book specifically devoted to the history and prospects of the new modernist studies.

For Virginia Woolf, H.D., Mary Butts and Gwendolyn Brooks, things mobilise creativity, traverse domestic, public and rural spaces and stage the interaction between the sublime and the mundane. Ordinary things are rendered extraordinary by their spiritual or emotional significance, and yet their very ordinariness remains part of their value. This book addresses the intersection of spirituality, things and places – both natural and built environments – in the work of these four women modernists. From the living pebbles in Mary Butts's memoir to the pencil sought in Woolf's urban pilgrimage in 'Street Haunting', the Christmas decorations crafted by children in H.D.'s autobiographical novel The Gift and Maud Martha's love of dandelions in Brooks's only novel, things indicate spiritual concerns in these writers' work. Elizabeth Anderson contributes to current debates around materiality, vitalism and post-secularism, attending to both mainstream and heterodox spiritual expressions and connections between the two in modernism. How we value our spaces and our world being one of the most pressing contemporary ethical and ecological concerns, this volume contributes to the debate by arguing that a change in our attitude towards the environment will not come from a theory of renunciation but through attachment to and regard for material things.

"A cultural history and interpretation of Brazilian modernism in arts and letters demands a transatlantic point of view. Artists, writers, musicians, and architects from both sides of the Atlantic interact to create a modern style for Brazil that shapes national expression and self-definition for the twentieth century. The presence of Brazilians in Europe and of Europeans in Brazil and the intense interrelationships among them energize modernism from the century's first decades until the end of the 1920s. For the Brazilians, a main goal is to transform the historical transatlantic dynamic into international recognition for a Brazilian aesthetic in the arts, sharing the appeal of folk and musical traditions, indigenous cultures and societies, and the ideal of national modernization Many travelled to Europe to find their place in the world, with nothing to offer except their talent, their belief in themselves, and their desire to modernize their country. The 1928 Revista de Antropofagia (Cannibal Magazine), the theme of cannibalism codified in Oswald de Andrade's "Manifesto Antropófago" (Cannibal Manifesto), and the iconic image of the painting O Abaporu by Tarsila do Amaral are the works that orient a cultural history of the avant-garde. Through creative genius they shape the nature and definition of modernity for Brazil in the 20th century"--

In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture. Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.

This book provides a fresh assessment of the works of British-born poet and painter Mina Loy. Laura Scuriatti shows how Loy’s “eccentric” writing and art celebrate ideas and aesthetics central to the modernist movement while simultaneously critiquing them, resulting in a continually self-reflexive and detached stance that Scuriatti terms “critical modernism.” Drawing on archival material, Scuriatti illuminates the often-overlooked influence of Loy’s time spent amid Italian avant-garde culture. In particular, she considers Loy’s assessment of the nature of genius and sexual identity as defined by philosopher Otto Weininger and in Lacerba, a magazine founded by Giovanni Papini. She also investigates Loy’s reflections on the artistic masterpiece in relation to the world of commodities; explores the dialogic nature of the self in Loy’s autobiographical projects; and shows how Loy used her “eccentric” stance as a political position, especially in her later career in the United States. Offering new insights into Loy’s feminism and tracing the writer’s lifelong exploration of themes such as authorship, art, identity, genius, and cosmopolitanism, this volume prompts readers to rethink the place, value, and function of key modernist concepts through the critical spaces created by Loy’s texts.