Full Description
This collection addresses the gap in American critical history regarding the role of spiritual discourse in literary modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. No book-length research has yet been published about spirituality and American Literary Modernism, with the exception of a few books on individual authors. The majority of the primary and critical material this book examines has been either rarely or incompletely considered from this angle. The volume highlights those American writers and texts who insisted on the spiritual relevance of literature, despite the growing secularity of literary modernism, bringing together a range of scholars to inspire both professors and students of American literature to look again and reconsider the spiritual discourse represented in the literature between the World Wars.
Contents
SECTION ONE: Religious Reconciliations and Redefinitions of Modernism.- Chapter 1: "The American Review and the Theopoetics of Interwar Modernism".- Chapter 2: "A Tale of Two Immigrant Toms: The Anglo-American Ascetic Response to Modernism".- Chapter 3: "God, the Middlebrow, and The Bookman".- Chapter 4: "Thomas Wolfe Confronts Modernism's 'Futility People'".- SECTION TWO: Gendered Regenerations.- Chapter 5: "To Market, to Market: Jesse Redmon Fauset's Critique of Secular Materialism as Spiritual Death in Plum Bun".- Chapter 6: "'Making the Jump': Eudora Welty's Empathy as Antidote to Modernist Alienation".- Chapter 7: "Redemption, Regeneration and the Gothic Sublime in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood".- Chapter 8: "In Love with Life's Spirit: Idealistic Devotion in Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock (1931) and Lucy Gayheart (1935)".- SECTION THREE: Doubt and Degradation as Displaced Faith and Transcendence.- Chapter 9: "Love and Loss and Questions Without Answers: Faith and Doubt in The Bridge of San Luis Rey".- Chapter 10: "Faulkner's Darl as Modernist Scapegoat".- Chapter 11: "Henry Miller's spiritual quest: 'sow strife and ferment so that... the dead may be restored to life".- Chapter 12: "The Abyss of Faith in The Big Sleep".
