Modernism's national scriptures: Nation, religion, and fantasy in the novel, 1918--1932

This project shows how modernist writers negotiated the exchange between nationalism and religion following the Great War. While theories of nationalism typically suggest that the modern nation replaced religion as the primary allegiance, this study theorizes an interaction model where both the nation and faith are altered in their exchange. Nationalism draws upon religious language for its sense of transcendence, while religions are shaped by their national contexts. Key texts of British modernism engaged their post-war national and religious contexts as modernist writers explored new possibilities for community and collective identity. The period of European history from the end of the Great War to Hitler's assumption of power in January 1933 was fraught with epoch-defining events like the Paris Peace Treaties, revolution and statehood in Ireland, and England's General Strike of 1926. In Britain, the national and imperial status was prominent in public consciousness, and responses to British power from politicians, church leaders, and intellectuals shaped the discourse in which artists participated. Modernist writers used experimental aesthetics as a means of addressing contemporary social problems, of articulating the multiplicities in political debate, and for re-writing national myths and religious orthodoxies. Novels which construct national identities may be read as "national scriptures," secular artifacts that, like holy books, tell the stories of a people and shape that people in the process.; Although critics once defined modernism through introversion, alienation, and isolation, this study argues that modernists' engagements with contemporary religious and national ideologies display concern for viable communities in the post-war world. The inherited institutions of church and state seemed inadequate, and part of the task for modernist writers was to imagine some replacement for this failed inheritance. The experimental forms of novels by Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Lewis disrupted contemporary national myths and religious orthodoxies in order to imagine community that was related to but distinct from religion and nation. If the realist novels of the 19 th century engaged their social and political contexts through stable characters, omniscient narrators, and recognizable plot development, then modernist novels may be read as fantasies that engage politics by resisting realistic literary conventions.