Mysticism And The Mid Century Novel

This book argues that many of the mid-twentieth century's significant novelists were united by a desire to return the increasingly interior novel to ethical engagement. They did not seek morality in society, politics or the individual will, but sought to unveil a transcendent Good by using techniques drawn from the canon of mystical literature

This volume discusses the relationships between the philosophy of Mysticism, which traces its lineage back into prehistory, with that of the world of more traditional philosophy and literature. The author argues for the centrality of mysticism's role in the philosophical and artistic development of western culture. The connections between these worlds are underscored as the author examines the works of Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Iris Murdoch, Yeats, Æ (George Russell), T.S. Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, Huxley, Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tony Kushner, among others.

Romanticism marked a dramatic turning point in philosophy and aesthetics. The shift from Classicism to Romanticism to Modernism and its Posts is paralleled in the shift from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Derrida. The central notions of the Enlightenment: nature, progress, rationalism, and rejection of the irrational are opposed by the central notions of the Counter-Enlightenment: relativism, vitalism, anti-rationalism, and sense of the organic. Then there is the idea of freedom at the heart of the West’s religious and secular vocabularies. The authors discussed in this study ask their readers to consider the question of freedom and constraints upon it. For some, freedom is found in Christianity; for others, Christianity is freedom’s enemy.

During and after the Second World War, there was a concerted thinking about religion in Britain. Not only were leading international thinkers of the day theologians--Ronald Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain--but leading writers contributed to discussions about religion. Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Barbara Pym incorporated miracles, evil, and church-going into their novels, while Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis gave radio broadcasts about the role of Christianity in contemporary society. Certainly the war revived interest in aspects of Christian life. Salvation and redemption were on many people's minds. The Ministry of Information used images of bombed churches to stoke patriotic fervour, and King George VI led a series of Days of National Prayer that coincided with crucial events in the Allied campaign. After the war and throughout the 1950s, approximately 1.4 million Britons converted to Roman Catholicism as a way of expressing their spiritual ambitions and solidarity with humanity on a world-wide scale. Religion provided one way for writers to answer the question, 'what is man?' It also afforded ways to think about social obligation and ethical engagement. Moreover, the mid-century turn to religion offered ways to articulate statehood, not from the perspective of nationhood and politics, but from the perspective of moral action and social improvement. Instead of being a retreat into seclusion and solitude, the mid-century turn to religion is a call to responsibility.

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment. Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.

In popular usage, "mysticism" typically refers to New Age or Eastern forms of spirituality. However, the mystical tradition is also an important component of the Christian tradition. At its heart--and much like its expression in other faith traditions--Christian mysticism is an ancient practice that incorporates meditation, contemplation, worship, philosophy, the quest for personal enlightenment, and the experience of Divine presence. This volume is a comprehensive introduction and guide to Christian mysticism. It is a big book about a big possibility: the hope of achieving real, blissful, experiential unison with God. Among the topics covered here are a general introduction to mysticism, the Bible and mysticism, the history and types of Christian mysticism, biographical sketches of leading Christian mystics, and practical instructions about practicing mysticism today. This is a breathtaking work that explores a form of spirituality that has changed lives over the course of 2,000 years. Learning about Christian mysticism and how it has been articulated through the centuries will prove inspirational for today's seekers, regardless of the faith tradition. "The mystic is not a special kind of person; every person is a special kind of mytic." --William McNamara

The novels of Australia’s Nobel Laureate Patrick White (1912–1990) are a persistent commentary on Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death. As White knew the proclamation was not about God’s existence, but about classical views of God, it presented him with the impossible task of using language to describe what language cannot describe. This has always been one of the more misunderstood aspects of his literary vision. Because the announcement is often interpreted in antithetical ways, atheistic, theistic, secular, religious, humanistic and fatalistic, critics should gain a better understanding of what White was trying to achieve by comparing him with his post-war contemporaries from England, Scotland, and Canada: Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Robertson Davies. After, and because of, the war, these authors all commented on the consequences of God’s death. Along with White, they worked with a shared pattern of tropes to explore the light and dark aspects of western consciousness and the civilization it has produced. Where did the pattern come from? Was it metaphysical or metapsychological? These questions are complex as the pattern came from many sources, simultaneously and synergistically, but this book tackles these questions by describing that pattern.