Angels of modernism
Subtitle: religion, culture, aesthetics 1910-1960
By: Suzanne Hobson
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9780230275393
Subjects: Angels in literature; Angels in art; Angels in popular culture; Angels
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 208-222) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: twentieth-century angelology; title: 'On the side of the angels': historical angels and angels of history; title: 'The angel club': the angel versus the Ubermensch; title: 'Angels on all fours': the third sex and angels with 'a difference'; title: 'The necessary angel of earth': World War II and the utopian imagination.