The English Modernist Novel As Political Theology

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

When British and American leaders today talk of the nation—whether it is Boris Johnson, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump—they do so, in part, in terms established by eighteenth-century British literature. The city on a hill and the sovereign individual are tropes at the center of modern Anglo-American political thought, and the literature that accompanied Britain’s rise to imperial prominence played a key role in creating them. We Are Kings is the first book to interpret eighteenth-century British literature from the perspective of political theology. Spencer Jackson returns here to a body of literature long associated with modernity’s origins without assuming that modernity entails a separation of the religious from the profane. The result is a study that casts this literature in a surprisingly new light. From the patriot to the marriage plot, the narratives and characters of eighteenth-century British literature are the products of the politicization of religion, Jackson argues; the real story of this literature is neither secularization nor the survival of orthodox Judeo-Christianity but rather the expansion of a movement beginning in the High Middle Ages to transfer the transcendent authority of the Catholic Church to the English political sphere. The novel and the modern individual, then, are in a sense both secular and religious at once—products of a modern political faith that has authorized Anglo-American exceptionalism from the eighteenth century to the present.

The modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. Such novelists as Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka found methods to describe through fiction the sorts of experiences that had traditionally been the domain of religious mystics and believers. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion. Through comparisons of major novelists with sociologists and psychologists from the same period, Lewis identifies the unique ways that literature addressed the changing spiritual situation of the early twentieth century. He challenges accounts that assume secularisation as the main narrative for understanding twentieth-century literature. Lewis explores the experiments that modernists undertook in order to invoke the sacred without directly naming it, resulting in a compelling study for readers of twentieth-century modernist literature.

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other. In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Rancière, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology. Political Theology and Early Modernity explores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these essays probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This stimulating collection is the first to answer not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of political theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the reemergence of political theology as an intellectual and political problem deepens our understanding of the early modern period.

This book addresses an under-researched area of modernist studies, reconsidering modernist attitudes towards feeling in the light of the humanities' turn to affect.

Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its succession. The increasing power of the dead under law in the US, the UK, and beyond-a concern of recent volumes in law and social sciences-is here addressed through a distinctive approach based on law and humanities. Vividly treating literary and biblical battles of will, the book suggests approaches to legal constitution informed by these dramas and by English legal history. This study investigates correlations between the will of God in Judeo-Christian traditions and the Last Wills of humans, especially dominant males, in cultures where these traditions have developed. It is interdisciplinary, in the sense that it engages with the limits of several fields: it is informed by humanities critical theory, especially Benjaminian historical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but refrains from detailed theoretical considerations. Dramatic narratives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton are read as suggesting real possibilities for alternative inheritance (i.e., constitutional) regimes. As Jenkins shows, these texts propose ways to alleviate violence, violence both personal and political, through attention to inheritance law.