Modernism and Theology

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Introduction

   • Joanna Rzepa

   Pages 1-24

3. Reconciling Christianity and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-25

      PDF

   2. A Theological History of Modernism

      • Joanna Rzepa

      Pages 27-88

   3. Spiritualising the War: Religion, Conflict, and Politics

      • Joanna Rzepa

      Pages 89-136

   4. Spaces of Encounter: Theological Modernism and Neo-scholasticism in Literature and Literary Criticism

      • Joanna Rzepa

      Pages 137-193

4. Poetry, Aesthetics, and Theology (c. 1900–1950)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 195-195

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   2. The Ripening Dark God of Modernity: Religion and Creativity in Rainer Maria Rilke’s and Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Writings

      • Joanna Rzepa

      Pages 197-265

   3. A ‘Raid on the Absolute’: Dogmatic Tradition and Mystical Experience in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism

      • Joanna Rzepa

      Pages 267-336

   4. ‘A Passionate Pursuit of the Real’: Theology and Poetics in Czesław Miłosz’s Writings

      • Joanna Rzepa

      Pages 337-406

   5. Epilogue

      • Joanna Rzepa

      Pages 407-427

5. Back Matter

   Pages 429-438

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This is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. It shows that early-twentieth-century authors, poets, and critics, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz, actively engaged with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians raging across Europe. These debates contributed to developing new ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and literature, and informed contemporary critical writings on aesthetics and poetics.

• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Secularisation
• Dogma
• Heresy
• Miłosz
• Rilke
• Eliot
• Literary modernism
• Poetry
• Controversy

“Modernism and Theology: Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz is an academic monograph of high quality. … Time and again, as a reader of this book, I am made aware of the undiminished actuality … which occupied the minds of theological and literary thinkers … . In spite of being a work of immensely careful and detailed scholarship concentrated on a defined period in the past … it keeps the Modernist chapter wide open to the present.” (Jean Ward, Konteksy Kultury, Vol. 19 (3), 2022)

'Joanna Rzepa’s Modernism and Theology forcefully upends the provincial secularization thesis of Anglo-American literary modernism by placing it in the larger international and historical context of theological modernism, showing how major writers from different cultures and languages have explored and asserted the primacy of spiritual and mystical elements of literature over secularism and materialism. This revolutionary study will have a lasting impact on future studies of literary modernism and generate expansive scholarship and revaluation in the field.'

—Ronald Schuchard, General Editor, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot

• University of Essex, Colchester, UK

  Joanna Rzepa

Joanna Rzepa is Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She researches and teaches twentieth-century literature and culture, comparative literature, and literary translation. Her work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Comparative Critical Studies, Translation Studies, and other leading journals.

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