Angels of Modernism : Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-1960

The angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures. This book uses the angel to explore the relations between modernist literature and early twentieth-century debates over the secular and/or religious character of the modern age. Angels of Modernism explores the many and various ways that angels are represented in modernist literary cultures. Seen by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Virginia Woolf as belonging to a religious or Victorian past, the angel might easily have been consigned to history along with other tropes considered too old-fashioned or sentimental for modern(ist) literary tastes. This book argues that it is precisely the angel's lack of fit with self-consciously modern attitudes to art and belief that explains its continued attraction to modernist writers as well as its capacity to generate new meanings. On the one hand, the angel appears as a symbol of resistance to secularizing tendencies in aesthetics and religion. On the other, it is a motile figure appropriated and transformed by a variety of interests from sex-reform campaigners to designers of new utopias. From Walter Benjamin, through Djuna Barnes, H.D., D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf, angels continue to perform cultural and critical work even as they are identified as incongruous and untimely Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology....Pages 1-33 ‘On the Side of the Angels’: Historical Angels and Angels of History....Pages 34-71 ‘The Angel Club’: The Angel versus the Ubermensch ....Pages 72-111 ‘Angels on All Fours’: The Third Sex and Angels with ‘A Difference’....Pages 112-140 ‘The Necessary Angel of Earth’: World War II and the Utopian Imagination....Pages 141-181 Back Matter....Pages 182-226