A01=Steve Pinkerton
AD=20200730
Author_Steve Pinkerton
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=NL-DS
Category=NL-HR
Category=QRAM7
COP=United States
Discount=15
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
HMM=234
IMPN=Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN13=9780197523254
Language_English
PA=Not yet available
PD=20200700
POP=New York
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Forthcoming
PUB=Oxford University Press Inc
SN=MODERNIST LITERATURE AND CULTURE SERIES
Subject=Literature: History & Criticism
Subject=Religion & Beliefs
WMM=156
Product details
- ISBN 9780197523254
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 231 x 155mm
- Publication Date: 22 Jun 2020
- Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication City/Country: New York, US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural and ideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.
Steve Pinkerton is a Lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University.
