Introduction

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.