Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism

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Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de sicle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

Reviews

Decadent Catholicism suggests a more renovating account of the literary interest of religious faith, evincing that flavor of Catholicismdecadent or otherwisewhich animates the achievements of modernism. As a result, Eliots poetry emerges not as anachronistically, artificially, or austerely Anglo-Catholic, but as drawing upon diverse artistic contexts which are in their own right compelling. * Time Present *
Martin Lockerd's book is a richly detailed and delightfully readable study of the strange religious and aesthetic afterlife of the Decadent Movement well beyond the trials of Oscar Wilde. With its numerous and perverse Catholic converts, literary Decadence continued to reimagine itself in the work of many of the most canonical and not-so-canonical modernists in English, including James Joyce, Ronald Firbank, and Evelyn Waugh. A very challenging new reading! * Professor Ellis Hanson, Cornell University, USA *

Author Bio

Martin Lockerd is Assistant Professor of English at Schreiner University, USA, where he live in Texas hill country with his wife and three daughters. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin. He has published articles on the relationship between decadent and modernist literature in The Yeats/Eliot Review, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies.