Overview

Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity's cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian theology: for them, religion involved intellectual and emotional assent, doctrinal articulation, and ritual practice. Domestico reveals how an important strand of modern poetry actually understood itself in and through the central theological questions of the modernist era: What is transcendence, and how can we think and write about it? What is the sacramental act, and how does its wedding of the immanent and the transcendent inform the poetic act? How can we relate kairos (holy time) to chronos (clock time)? Seeking answers to these complex questions, Domestico examines both modernist institutions (the Criterion) and specific works of modern poetry (Eliot's Four Quartets and Jones's The Anathemata). The book also traces the contours of what it dubs ""theological modernism"": a body of poetry that is both theological and modernist. In doing so, this book offers a new literary history of the modernist period, one that attends both to the material circulation of texts and to the broader intellectual currents of the time.

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9781421423319

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Reviews

There is certainly no easy way to replicate the environment of the interwar period, but Anthony Domestico is to be commended for implanting such a desire in his readers. Perhaps some of these readers will be stirred to action. I for one would love to hold a contemporary equivalent to the Criterion in my hands, and I believe that Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period succeeds in that it will make others want this as well. * Marginalia Review of Books * This brief but substantial study details how contemporary theological debates were part and parcel of the wider intellectual climate of modernism, as well as a specific influence on poetry by T. S. Eliot, David Jones, and W. H. Auden. It is a welcome addition to recent work on the inescapable and continuing influence of Christianity at every stage of the modernist project. * Review of English Studies * I also recently read Anthony Domestico's wonderful and revelatory critical book Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, which has much to say about whether poetry and theology can nourish each other (for many of the modern poets, Domestico argues quite convincingly, they certainly did). -- Christian Wiman * Subtropics *

I also recently read Anthony Domestico's wonderful and revelatory critical book Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, which has much to say about whether poetry and theology can nourish each other (for many of the modern poets, Domestico argues quite convincingly, they certainly did). --Christian Wiman Subtropics

Author Information

Anthony Domestico is an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and a books columnist for Commonweal.

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