Books (Monograph) by Jamie Callison
Edinburgh University Press (Open Access Monograph), 2023
‘Modernism and Religion’ argues that literary modernism participated in broader processes of reli... more ‘Modernism and Religion’ argues that literary modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse at the turn of the twentieth century is carried over into one of the principle stylistic features of literary modernism, namely the epiphanies of James Joyce’s early work. Literary modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights discourse, Christian sociology, and philosophical personalism, which are explored here in relation to the work of the modernist poets David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and H.D., represented – so this study argues – a strategic attempt on the part of diverse religious authorities to meet the challenge posed by new mysticism. Orthodoxy was itself made new in ways that resisted the secular demand that religion remain a private undertaking. ‘Modernism and Religion’ presents the unusual forms evident across the work of the aforementioned writers as an alternative to epiphanic modernism. Their wavering orthodoxy brings matters from which the secular had previously separated religion back once more into its purview.
Books (Critical Editions) by Jamie Callison
Modernist Archives, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018
Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David ... more Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones's 'The Grail Mass', the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece 'The Anathemata' – a work described by W.H. Auden as 'one of the most important poems of our times' – and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection. With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones's literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.
In addition to the text of 'The Grail Mass', this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.
Journal Articles by Jamie Callison
ELH, Nov 30, 2017
This essay explores the porous borders between science and religion in T.S. Eliot’s life and work... more This essay explores the porous borders between science and religion in T.S. Eliot’s life and work. I argue that accounts of the subconscious, developed by pre-Freudian psychologists and subsequently taken up in famous accounts of the psychology of religion, exerted a wide-ranging and hitherto unappreciated influence upon Eliot’s creative and critical thought. Through detailed analysis of the Eliot papers held at the Houghton Library, Harvard, alongside an essay previously thought lost, “A Neglected Aspect of George Chapman” (1924), I trace Eliot’s exposure to this intellectual tradition through his graduate reading in Pierre Janet, William James, and Evelyn Underhill, with the latter two drawing heavily on a fourth figure, the psychic researcher, Frederic W.H. Myers.
This intellectual tradition informed, as I show, one of Eliot’s major critical concepts, the “dissociation of sensibility,” and shaped his understanding of the creative process outlined in “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.” The willingness of this particular branch of scientific discourse to attend to the origins of religion without commenting on its value, I argue, not only provides an important cultural context for Eliot’s fascination with both mysticism and skepticism, but also informs the slippages in tone, at once visionary and moribund, in “The Hollow Men.”
Modernist Cultures, Nov 30, 2017
Much recent critical interest in the relationship between modernism and religion has concerned it... more Much recent critical interest in the relationship between modernism and religion has concerned itself with the occult, spiritualism and theosophy as opposed to institutional religion, relying on an implicit analogy between the experimental in religion and the experimental in art. I argue that considering Christianity to be antithetical to modernism not only obscures an important facet of modernist religious culture, but also misrepresents the at-once tentative and imaginative thinking that marks the modernist response to religion.
I explore the ways in which the poet-painter David Jones combined sources familiar from cultural modernism – namely Frazer's ‘The Golden Bough’ – with Catholic thinking on the Eucharist to constitute a modernism that is both hopeful about the possibilities for aesthetic form and cautious about the unavoidable limitations of human creativity. I present Jones' openness to the creative potential of the Mass as his equivalent to the more recognisably modernist explorations of non-Western and ancient ritual: Eliot's Sanskrit poetry, Picasso's African masks and Stravinsky's shamanic rites and suggest that his understanding of the church as overflowing with creative possibilities serves as a counterweight to the empty churches of Pericles Lewis’ seminal work, ‘Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel.’
Literature and Theology, Mar 10, 2017
Recent critical discussion has suggested that cultural modernism took its impetus from a rallying... more Recent critical discussion has suggested that cultural modernism took its impetus from a rallying cry against the Vatican's condemnation of theological modernism in 1907. As a counterpoint to this position, I trace the intra-Catholic counter reaction to the bull – a reaction that continued to explore issues important to modernity while steering clear of sensitive topics – that had lasting influence on the work of T.S. Eliot and David Jones. This historical excavation opens up an underappreciated area of thought that complements recent approaches to the study of modernism and religion.
Notes and Queries, Dec 2014
The unnoticed parallel in question is The Book of Common Prayer’s translation of the modified fin... more The unnoticed parallel in question is The Book of Common Prayer’s translation of the modified final refrain of the 'Agnus Dei': 'Grant us thy peace', which is replicated in Simeon's repeated 'Grant us thy peace' in the poem under discussion. In the note, I briefly explain what leads us to look for this additional liturgical text, the context for the liturgical use of the ‘Agnus Dei’ and how the tone of the poem is altered as a result.
Book Chapters by Jamie Callison
Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
H.D.’s friendship and correspondence with her literary executor Norman Holmes Pearson guided her ... more H.D.’s friendship and correspondence with her literary executor Norman Holmes Pearson guided her not only in the writing of new texts, but also in the editing and annotating work that scholars would take up later. H.D.’s work in her capacity as self-archiver has shaped recent scholarly editions of some of her previously unpublished prose works. The chapter highlights the significance of the archive to these works through not only the preservation the archive afforded them but also the ways they thematize archival research. One outcome of this recent scholarly publishing enterprise is that works not published in H.D.’s lifetime now exist in critical editions while the poetry upon which her legacy was built remains largely unannotated. The essay considers how recent scholarly editions of H.D.’s prose might inform future work on a critical edition of H.D.’s poetry.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives, 2024
This chapter contextualises the archival turn in modernist studies and outlines several trends in... more This chapter contextualises the archival turn in modernist studies and outlines several trends in recent archivally informed scholarship. The archival turn has informed a range of recent critical editions of modernist texts, produced by scholars located both within and outside of the genetic criticism tradition and issuing in both print and digital editions. Modernist scholarship has also engaged in a reconsideration of the nature of the archive; that is, of the location of the archive and the forms materials one might expect to find in it. Finally, the chapter notes that attempts to expand scholarly understandings of modernism have been met with a challenge, namely the ways in which the legacy of marginalised writers has been shaped by the absences of or exclusions from institutional archives.
The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion, 2023
This chapter uses the example of the twentieth-century retreat movement to challenge several assu... more This chapter uses the example of the twentieth-century retreat movement to challenge several assumptions about the relationship between secularisation and literary modernism. It shows how institutional religions – in this case of the Church of England – responded to processes of religious change at work through the first half of the twentieth century. The silent retreats developed by the Anglo-Catholic Association for Promoting Retreats (APR) represent an attempt on the part of institutional religion to draw on (and to draw in) the contemporary interest in mysticism and spirituality and to provide it with a religious home within the church. The development of a new religious practice, namely the rise of mass participation in lay retreat, is considered alongside developments in twentieth-century religious poetry as represented by T. S. Eliot’s 'Four Quartets'. The chapter argues that transformations in religious orthodoxy are as an important a development in the emerging relationship between modernism and religion as the rise of new religions and the well-documented prominence of no religion.
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, Jan 1, 2017
This essay affords the first extensive reading of T.S. Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s ‘App... more This essay affords the first extensive reading of T.S. Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s ‘Appearance and Reality.’ I draw attention to a shift in Eliot’s way of doing philosophy over the course of his year at Merton College, Oxford, 1914-1915; a shift that had consequences for the ways in which Eliot read or re-read Bradley. Drawing on Heather Jackson’s work on marginalia, I argue that Eliot’s notes on Bradley provide a window on this act of reading. In particular, I suggest that Eliot’s quibble with Bradley’s use of the word “transmute” – evident in the marginalia – opens up an extended conversation between the two authors and within which “Tradition and the Individual Talent” can be located. I offer not so much a new account of Bradley’s influence on Eliot as an enriched picture of the manner in which influence can be said to be exerted.
A Piercing Darkness: Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing , 2015
Appraising Evelyn Underhill’s contribution to twentieth-century mysticism, the feminist theologia... more Appraising Evelyn Underhill’s contribution to twentieth-century mysticism, the feminist theologian, Grace Jantzen, expressed disappointment in the direction of Underhill’s spiritual journey: insofar as it led away from traditional sites of women’s religion: ‘the interconnectedness of all things, the importance of looking for God within, the necessity of making the connections and allowing for spaciousness of thought and of love’, and moved towards an ever-increasing appreciation of the role of the institutional church in guiding and shaping this spirituality. Jantzen lays the blame for, what she perceives to be, these missteps at the door of Underhill’s spiritual director, Friedrich von Hügel.
This paper, however, will bring Jantzen into conversation with Susan Stanford Friedman who portrays a comparable relationship between a male authority figure and a creative female subject – that of Sigmund Freud and the modernist poet, H.D. – not in terms of male influence but as a site of contention. Friedman demonstrates how H.D. resisted the conventional models of patient, student and disciple via an examination of the context of their interaction as much as the content. Following Friedman, I aim to examine different forms of spiritual direction with which Underhill was involved: as the directee of Robert Hugh Benson and von Hügel and the director of Marjorie Robinson, as a way of elucidating key themes for the study of women modernists and spirituality: the notion of a modernist spirituality, forms of discipleship and the role of institutional religion at the turn of the twentieth century.
We will note how Underhill developed a distinctly modernist approach to religious matters through her attempts to elucidate traditional Christian phenomena in light of modern scientific discoveries: in particular, Underhill’s interest in the burgeoning field of religious psychology. This was an interest that Underhill’s first director, Benson, failed to appreciate; a failing that doomed their relationship from its inception. Drawing on a theologian of religious experience, Anne Taves, we will survey how one particular theory of mind, proposed by F.W.H. Myers and taken up by the American William James and the Frenchman Henri Delacroix, influenced Underhill’s work. In fact, it was von Hügel’s interest and expertise in this area that enabled him to respond to Underhill in a way that Benson could not; an appreciation that made the recommendations, from both men, that Underhill develop a greater affinity with institutional religion very different in character.
This theory of mind, we will suggest, served as a criterion for Underhill’s most famous work, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness; the success of which, it has been argued, lay in the abundance of quotations from often hard-to-find mystical accounts within its pages. While the modern historian of mysticism, Bernard McGinn, has expressed concern that quotations were selected according to a preconceived theory of mysticism in the manner of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, we will show how the development of this theory enabled Underhill to collaborate with her spiritual directee, Robinson, on spiritual matters. Underhill relied upon Robinson’s language skills when working upon the rich vein of German mystical texts but this collaboration is marked by a free movement between academic concerns and spiritual direction. We will see how this free movement provides an example of the development of a modernist spirituality and of a collaborative model of interaction that challenges Benson’s reliance upon spiritual authority.
Literature Reviews by Jamie Callison
Essays in Criticism, 2018
Edited Collections by Jamie Callison
Bloomsbury Academic, 2024
Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has sh... more Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing 'practitioner's toolkit' (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work.
Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'.
This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism
Brill Studies in Religion and the Arts, 2017
‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘maki... more ‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘making it new’ through formal experimentation, and a widespread drive towards a regenerated New Era of human history. For many modernists, Christianity stood for a bygone era to be overcome; the reactionary, dead hand of the past.
Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.
The tensions and unexpected harmonies between Jones’s unrivalled celebration of human creative potential and his sharp sense of cultural decline, and also between his respective commitments to a stridently-felt Catholicism and his deep-seated vocation for modernist artistic experimentation, are the focus of the contributions to this innovative critical collection. In illuminating the challenging theoretical category of “Christian modernism”, the collection will enable the recovery, for modernist studies, of previously unstudied areas of literary modernist endeavour. (Beyond Jones studies, this may provide the basis for a reconsideration of existing modernist figures as diverse as W.H. Auden, Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.) A further section of this volume will concern itself with the influence exerted by David Jones on post-war British poetry, whether on the late modernist work of Geoffrey Hill or on the religiously-lit poetry of Elizabeth Jennings. Another chapter in this collection will attend to the religious aspect of the “Christian modernist” formulation in order to ask: what implications does Jones’s work have for theology and, how, in turn can theological categories illuminate his searching, complex but ultimately rewarding poetry?
In carving out new routes into Jones Studies, the contributors will return again and again to the established trope of “difficulty” in avant-garde poetry and in doing so will examine the many ways in which Jones’s poetry can be described as “difficult”. A portion of the volume will detail the perspectives of a range of readers, creative and critical, inside and outside the academy, to the challenges and triumphs of Jones’s works, while – in a further section – the volume will refuse to shy away from the problematic aspects of Jones’s cultural theory. For example, Jones firmly rooted notion of cultural decay orientated his politics and gave rise to a thoroughly unlovely contemplation of Nazi ideology. Finally, the volume will consider the resistance of Jones’s work in the face of post-modern interpretations; a resistance that has contributed to a surprising critical neglect over the last thirty years but which also – as the leading Oxford theologian, Paul Fiddes points out in his contribution to the collection – affords a rare resource for rethinking existing critical paradigms as we embark upon a new era of post-secular literary theory.
The far-reaching questions posed by the six sections of this volume will serve as both a snapshot of Jones Studies as it stands today – including contributions by established authorities on his work, namely Thomas Dilworth, Tom Goldpaugh, Anne Price Owen, and Paul Robichaud – and also open up a range of questions for a new generation of Jones scholars. This volume will remain a standard reference work for Jones scholarship for years to come.
Book Reviews by Jamie Callison
Christianity & Literature, 2016
Journalism by Jamie Callison
PN Review, Nov 2015
An unpublished version of a previously published translation by David Jones.
Conference Organisation by Jamie Callison
In Jacques Maritain’s endnotes to his ‘Art et Scholastique’, citations from Thomas Aquinas sit si... more In Jacques Maritain’s endnotes to his ‘Art et Scholastique’, citations from Thomas Aquinas sit side-by-side with extracts from Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy and accounts of Cezanne. Avant-garde artistic theories and the Catholic tradition are energetically yoked or held in tension by an apparently innocuous “et”. Yet, for all the disagreement about what constitutes the avant-garde, there is a remarkable consensus as to its antithetical relationship with organised religion, justified by a variety of reasons: religious sentiment is construed as an aspect of bourgeois society against which the avant-garde rebelled; the acts of poiesis upon which the avant-garde centred is accorded a quasi-religious status that negates the role of institutional religion; or thanks to the unacknowledged influence of various secularisation theories, critics assume it is impossible to be forward-thinking and yet hold religious views.
The key historical event around which these ideas coalesce is the 1907 Papal Bull, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis’ which condemned a range of new intellectual movements under a single heading: ‘modernism’. A recent critical argument has suggested that literary ‘modernism’ – the peer of ‘avant-garde’ in demarking the artistic experimentation that this conference aims to address – took its impetus from a positive appropriation of the term from Catholic discourse. This would suggest that the relationship between Catholicism and the avant-garde could only ever be negative and unidirectional; with the Church lining up as one of the forces from which an artist must liberate him or herself. And yet, while apparently inauspicious for the creative tensions this conference plans to examine, attempts to steer clear of proscribed topics gave rise to wide-ranging discussions of aesthetics within Catholic circles.
Studies over the last decade: Ellis Hanson’s ‘Decadence and Catholicism’, Stephen Schloesser’s ‘Jazz-Age Catholicism’ and Rowan Williams’s ‘Grace and Necessity’ have outlined numerous instances where the relationship between Catholicism and the avant-garde – like that evident between the text and the footnotes in Maritain – has been mutually enriching, often in particular periods: English and French decadence, the interwar French Catholic intellectual scene and the artistic communities centred on Eric Gill at Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin. Recognition of this phenomenon demands a far-reaching revision to the narratives currently told about twentieth-century artistic endeavour and, indeed, a re-consideration of the way in which Catholicism has come to position itself in relation to society.
This one-day conference will initiate the revisionary process by foregrounding the stimulus Catholic thought has provided for experimentation across the arts from the 1890s onwards. Taking up the international resonance of the 'avant-garde', the conference organisers invite paper proposals (300 words) that engage with these issues from a European and global perspective – in the work of figures such as Gaudí, Marechal and Pasolini – as well as those that address the Anglophone and French writers who will serve as the subjects of the keynotes.
Participants may wish (while not being required) to focus on one or more of the following themes:
Single author/ artists/ movements studies including but not limited to: Djuna Barnes, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Bergson, Roy Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, the Ditchling Community, Ernest Dowson, T.S. Eliot, Ronald Firbank, Antoni Gaudí, David Gascoyne, Eric Gill, Graham Greene, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Lionel Johnson, David Jones, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Leopoldo Marechal, Jacques Maritain, Olivier Messiaen, Flannery O'Connor, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Charles Péguy, Ezra Pound, Muriel Spark, Edith Stein, Evelyn Waugh, Simone Weil.
Historical issues: Catholicism and literary decadence; creative responses to Pascendi Dominici Gregis; changes to the notion of an avant-garde Catholicism following Vatican II.
Theoretical consideration: modernism and religion, modernism and decadence, sacramental poetics, theological aesthetics.
‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘maki... more ‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘making it new’ through formal experimentation, and a widespread drive towards a regenerated New Era of human history. For many modernists, Christianity stood for a bygone era to be overcome; the reactionary, dead hand of the past.
Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.
This conference will examine the paradox of Jones the ‘Christian modernist’. Does the very concept of cultural ‘modernism’ perhaps need reassessment when confronted with his example? How is his experimental art, poetry and cultural theory relevant to theology? How does his work relate to the theological controversies of his day, especially the ‘modernist crisis’ within the Catholic church and beyond? How does the influence of other modernist art, theory and literature interact with Christian influences (whether theological or artistic) in his work? What was Jones’s influence upon other thinkers and creative artists, both those who shared his religious views, and those who did not? And is his complex vision of human beings as makers and artists who participate in divine creativity through their sign-making – while also hiding this from themselves – still relevant today? Or should it rather be analysed as a product of its time, an unfortunate idealisation that at one point even led Jones to affirm a limited sympathy for the ‘fascist and Nazi revolutions’?
It is the aim of this conference to confront the paradoxes and pleasures of reading and studying Jones head-on, in order to refine and extend our critical vocabulary to encompass an artist, poet and thinker who continues to challenge our preconceptions. Finally, perspectives that challenge the fruitfulness of the whole idea of Jones as ‘Christian modernist’ are also welcome. Are there reasons for steering clear of both terms? Is Jones’s work perhaps better seen as transcending or collapsing such categories?
Contributions are welcome not only from Jones specialists, but also from across modernist studies, theology, religious studies, philosophy, art history, intellectual and political history, aesthetics, poetics, and genetic manuscript studies.
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Books (Monograph) by Jamie Callison
Books (Critical Editions) by Jamie Callison
In addition to the text of 'The Grail Mass', this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.
Journal Articles by Jamie Callison
This intellectual tradition informed, as I show, one of Eliot’s major critical concepts, the “dissociation of sensibility,” and shaped his understanding of the creative process outlined in “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.” The willingness of this particular branch of scientific discourse to attend to the origins of religion without commenting on its value, I argue, not only provides an important cultural context for Eliot’s fascination with both mysticism and skepticism, but also informs the slippages in tone, at once visionary and moribund, in “The Hollow Men.”
I explore the ways in which the poet-painter David Jones combined sources familiar from cultural modernism – namely Frazer's ‘The Golden Bough’ – with Catholic thinking on the Eucharist to constitute a modernism that is both hopeful about the possibilities for aesthetic form and cautious about the unavoidable limitations of human creativity. I present Jones' openness to the creative potential of the Mass as his equivalent to the more recognisably modernist explorations of non-Western and ancient ritual: Eliot's Sanskrit poetry, Picasso's African masks and Stravinsky's shamanic rites and suggest that his understanding of the church as overflowing with creative possibilities serves as a counterweight to the empty churches of Pericles Lewis’ seminal work, ‘Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel.’
Book Chapters by Jamie Callison
This paper, however, will bring Jantzen into conversation with Susan Stanford Friedman who portrays a comparable relationship between a male authority figure and a creative female subject – that of Sigmund Freud and the modernist poet, H.D. – not in terms of male influence but as a site of contention. Friedman demonstrates how H.D. resisted the conventional models of patient, student and disciple via an examination of the context of their interaction as much as the content. Following Friedman, I aim to examine different forms of spiritual direction with which Underhill was involved: as the directee of Robert Hugh Benson and von Hügel and the director of Marjorie Robinson, as a way of elucidating key themes for the study of women modernists and spirituality: the notion of a modernist spirituality, forms of discipleship and the role of institutional religion at the turn of the twentieth century.
We will note how Underhill developed a distinctly modernist approach to religious matters through her attempts to elucidate traditional Christian phenomena in light of modern scientific discoveries: in particular, Underhill’s interest in the burgeoning field of religious psychology. This was an interest that Underhill’s first director, Benson, failed to appreciate; a failing that doomed their relationship from its inception. Drawing on a theologian of religious experience, Anne Taves, we will survey how one particular theory of mind, proposed by F.W.H. Myers and taken up by the American William James and the Frenchman Henri Delacroix, influenced Underhill’s work. In fact, it was von Hügel’s interest and expertise in this area that enabled him to respond to Underhill in a way that Benson could not; an appreciation that made the recommendations, from both men, that Underhill develop a greater affinity with institutional religion very different in character.
This theory of mind, we will suggest, served as a criterion for Underhill’s most famous work, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness; the success of which, it has been argued, lay in the abundance of quotations from often hard-to-find mystical accounts within its pages. While the modern historian of mysticism, Bernard McGinn, has expressed concern that quotations were selected according to a preconceived theory of mysticism in the manner of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, we will show how the development of this theory enabled Underhill to collaborate with her spiritual directee, Robinson, on spiritual matters. Underhill relied upon Robinson’s language skills when working upon the rich vein of German mystical texts but this collaboration is marked by a free movement between academic concerns and spiritual direction. We will see how this free movement provides an example of the development of a modernist spirituality and of a collaborative model of interaction that challenges Benson’s reliance upon spiritual authority.
Literature Reviews by Jamie Callison
Edited Collections by Jamie Callison
Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'.
This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism
Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.
The tensions and unexpected harmonies between Jones’s unrivalled celebration of human creative potential and his sharp sense of cultural decline, and also between his respective commitments to a stridently-felt Catholicism and his deep-seated vocation for modernist artistic experimentation, are the focus of the contributions to this innovative critical collection. In illuminating the challenging theoretical category of “Christian modernism”, the collection will enable the recovery, for modernist studies, of previously unstudied areas of literary modernist endeavour. (Beyond Jones studies, this may provide the basis for a reconsideration of existing modernist figures as diverse as W.H. Auden, Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.) A further section of this volume will concern itself with the influence exerted by David Jones on post-war British poetry, whether on the late modernist work of Geoffrey Hill or on the religiously-lit poetry of Elizabeth Jennings. Another chapter in this collection will attend to the religious aspect of the “Christian modernist” formulation in order to ask: what implications does Jones’s work have for theology and, how, in turn can theological categories illuminate his searching, complex but ultimately rewarding poetry?
In carving out new routes into Jones Studies, the contributors will return again and again to the established trope of “difficulty” in avant-garde poetry and in doing so will examine the many ways in which Jones’s poetry can be described as “difficult”. A portion of the volume will detail the perspectives of a range of readers, creative and critical, inside and outside the academy, to the challenges and triumphs of Jones’s works, while – in a further section – the volume will refuse to shy away from the problematic aspects of Jones’s cultural theory. For example, Jones firmly rooted notion of cultural decay orientated his politics and gave rise to a thoroughly unlovely contemplation of Nazi ideology. Finally, the volume will consider the resistance of Jones’s work in the face of post-modern interpretations; a resistance that has contributed to a surprising critical neglect over the last thirty years but which also – as the leading Oxford theologian, Paul Fiddes points out in his contribution to the collection – affords a rare resource for rethinking existing critical paradigms as we embark upon a new era of post-secular literary theory.
The far-reaching questions posed by the six sections of this volume will serve as both a snapshot of Jones Studies as it stands today – including contributions by established authorities on his work, namely Thomas Dilworth, Tom Goldpaugh, Anne Price Owen, and Paul Robichaud – and also open up a range of questions for a new generation of Jones scholars. This volume will remain a standard reference work for Jones scholarship for years to come.
Book Reviews by Jamie Callison
Journalism by Jamie Callison
Conference Organisation by Jamie Callison
The key historical event around which these ideas coalesce is the 1907 Papal Bull, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis’ which condemned a range of new intellectual movements under a single heading: ‘modernism’. A recent critical argument has suggested that literary ‘modernism’ – the peer of ‘avant-garde’ in demarking the artistic experimentation that this conference aims to address – took its impetus from a positive appropriation of the term from Catholic discourse. This would suggest that the relationship between Catholicism and the avant-garde could only ever be negative and unidirectional; with the Church lining up as one of the forces from which an artist must liberate him or herself. And yet, while apparently inauspicious for the creative tensions this conference plans to examine, attempts to steer clear of proscribed topics gave rise to wide-ranging discussions of aesthetics within Catholic circles.
Studies over the last decade: Ellis Hanson’s ‘Decadence and Catholicism’, Stephen Schloesser’s ‘Jazz-Age Catholicism’ and Rowan Williams’s ‘Grace and Necessity’ have outlined numerous instances where the relationship between Catholicism and the avant-garde – like that evident between the text and the footnotes in Maritain – has been mutually enriching, often in particular periods: English and French decadence, the interwar French Catholic intellectual scene and the artistic communities centred on Eric Gill at Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin. Recognition of this phenomenon demands a far-reaching revision to the narratives currently told about twentieth-century artistic endeavour and, indeed, a re-consideration of the way in which Catholicism has come to position itself in relation to society.
This one-day conference will initiate the revisionary process by foregrounding the stimulus Catholic thought has provided for experimentation across the arts from the 1890s onwards. Taking up the international resonance of the 'avant-garde', the conference organisers invite paper proposals (300 words) that engage with these issues from a European and global perspective – in the work of figures such as Gaudí, Marechal and Pasolini – as well as those that address the Anglophone and French writers who will serve as the subjects of the keynotes.
Participants may wish (while not being required) to focus on one or more of the following themes:
Single author/ artists/ movements studies including but not limited to: Djuna Barnes, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Bergson, Roy Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, the Ditchling Community, Ernest Dowson, T.S. Eliot, Ronald Firbank, Antoni Gaudí, David Gascoyne, Eric Gill, Graham Greene, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Lionel Johnson, David Jones, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Leopoldo Marechal, Jacques Maritain, Olivier Messiaen, Flannery O'Connor, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Charles Péguy, Ezra Pound, Muriel Spark, Edith Stein, Evelyn Waugh, Simone Weil.
Historical issues: Catholicism and literary decadence; creative responses to Pascendi Dominici Gregis; changes to the notion of an avant-garde Catholicism following Vatican II.
Theoretical consideration: modernism and religion, modernism and decadence, sacramental poetics, theological aesthetics.
Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.
This conference will examine the paradox of Jones the ‘Christian modernist’. Does the very concept of cultural ‘modernism’ perhaps need reassessment when confronted with his example? How is his experimental art, poetry and cultural theory relevant to theology? How does his work relate to the theological controversies of his day, especially the ‘modernist crisis’ within the Catholic church and beyond? How does the influence of other modernist art, theory and literature interact with Christian influences (whether theological or artistic) in his work? What was Jones’s influence upon other thinkers and creative artists, both those who shared his religious views, and those who did not? And is his complex vision of human beings as makers and artists who participate in divine creativity through their sign-making – while also hiding this from themselves – still relevant today? Or should it rather be analysed as a product of its time, an unfortunate idealisation that at one point even led Jones to affirm a limited sympathy for the ‘fascist and Nazi revolutions’?
It is the aim of this conference to confront the paradoxes and pleasures of reading and studying Jones head-on, in order to refine and extend our critical vocabulary to encompass an artist, poet and thinker who continues to challenge our preconceptions. Finally, perspectives that challenge the fruitfulness of the whole idea of Jones as ‘Christian modernist’ are also welcome. Are there reasons for steering clear of both terms? Is Jones’s work perhaps better seen as transcending or collapsing such categories?
Contributions are welcome not only from Jones specialists, but also from across modernist studies, theology, religious studies, philosophy, art history, intellectual and political history, aesthetics, poetics, and genetic manuscript studies.
In addition to the text of 'The Grail Mass', this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.
This intellectual tradition informed, as I show, one of Eliot’s major critical concepts, the “dissociation of sensibility,” and shaped his understanding of the creative process outlined in “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.” The willingness of this particular branch of scientific discourse to attend to the origins of religion without commenting on its value, I argue, not only provides an important cultural context for Eliot’s fascination with both mysticism and skepticism, but also informs the slippages in tone, at once visionary and moribund, in “The Hollow Men.”
I explore the ways in which the poet-painter David Jones combined sources familiar from cultural modernism – namely Frazer's ‘The Golden Bough’ – with Catholic thinking on the Eucharist to constitute a modernism that is both hopeful about the possibilities for aesthetic form and cautious about the unavoidable limitations of human creativity. I present Jones' openness to the creative potential of the Mass as his equivalent to the more recognisably modernist explorations of non-Western and ancient ritual: Eliot's Sanskrit poetry, Picasso's African masks and Stravinsky's shamanic rites and suggest that his understanding of the church as overflowing with creative possibilities serves as a counterweight to the empty churches of Pericles Lewis’ seminal work, ‘Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel.’
This paper, however, will bring Jantzen into conversation with Susan Stanford Friedman who portrays a comparable relationship between a male authority figure and a creative female subject – that of Sigmund Freud and the modernist poet, H.D. – not in terms of male influence but as a site of contention. Friedman demonstrates how H.D. resisted the conventional models of patient, student and disciple via an examination of the context of their interaction as much as the content. Following Friedman, I aim to examine different forms of spiritual direction with which Underhill was involved: as the directee of Robert Hugh Benson and von Hügel and the director of Marjorie Robinson, as a way of elucidating key themes for the study of women modernists and spirituality: the notion of a modernist spirituality, forms of discipleship and the role of institutional religion at the turn of the twentieth century.
We will note how Underhill developed a distinctly modernist approach to religious matters through her attempts to elucidate traditional Christian phenomena in light of modern scientific discoveries: in particular, Underhill’s interest in the burgeoning field of religious psychology. This was an interest that Underhill’s first director, Benson, failed to appreciate; a failing that doomed their relationship from its inception. Drawing on a theologian of religious experience, Anne Taves, we will survey how one particular theory of mind, proposed by F.W.H. Myers and taken up by the American William James and the Frenchman Henri Delacroix, influenced Underhill’s work. In fact, it was von Hügel’s interest and expertise in this area that enabled him to respond to Underhill in a way that Benson could not; an appreciation that made the recommendations, from both men, that Underhill develop a greater affinity with institutional religion very different in character.
This theory of mind, we will suggest, served as a criterion for Underhill’s most famous work, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness; the success of which, it has been argued, lay in the abundance of quotations from often hard-to-find mystical accounts within its pages. While the modern historian of mysticism, Bernard McGinn, has expressed concern that quotations were selected according to a preconceived theory of mysticism in the manner of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, we will show how the development of this theory enabled Underhill to collaborate with her spiritual directee, Robinson, on spiritual matters. Underhill relied upon Robinson’s language skills when working upon the rich vein of German mystical texts but this collaboration is marked by a free movement between academic concerns and spiritual direction. We will see how this free movement provides an example of the development of a modernist spirituality and of a collaborative model of interaction that challenges Benson’s reliance upon spiritual authority.
Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'.
This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism
Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.
The tensions and unexpected harmonies between Jones’s unrivalled celebration of human creative potential and his sharp sense of cultural decline, and also between his respective commitments to a stridently-felt Catholicism and his deep-seated vocation for modernist artistic experimentation, are the focus of the contributions to this innovative critical collection. In illuminating the challenging theoretical category of “Christian modernism”, the collection will enable the recovery, for modernist studies, of previously unstudied areas of literary modernist endeavour. (Beyond Jones studies, this may provide the basis for a reconsideration of existing modernist figures as diverse as W.H. Auden, Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.) A further section of this volume will concern itself with the influence exerted by David Jones on post-war British poetry, whether on the late modernist work of Geoffrey Hill or on the religiously-lit poetry of Elizabeth Jennings. Another chapter in this collection will attend to the religious aspect of the “Christian modernist” formulation in order to ask: what implications does Jones’s work have for theology and, how, in turn can theological categories illuminate his searching, complex but ultimately rewarding poetry?
In carving out new routes into Jones Studies, the contributors will return again and again to the established trope of “difficulty” in avant-garde poetry and in doing so will examine the many ways in which Jones’s poetry can be described as “difficult”. A portion of the volume will detail the perspectives of a range of readers, creative and critical, inside and outside the academy, to the challenges and triumphs of Jones’s works, while – in a further section – the volume will refuse to shy away from the problematic aspects of Jones’s cultural theory. For example, Jones firmly rooted notion of cultural decay orientated his politics and gave rise to a thoroughly unlovely contemplation of Nazi ideology. Finally, the volume will consider the resistance of Jones’s work in the face of post-modern interpretations; a resistance that has contributed to a surprising critical neglect over the last thirty years but which also – as the leading Oxford theologian, Paul Fiddes points out in his contribution to the collection – affords a rare resource for rethinking existing critical paradigms as we embark upon a new era of post-secular literary theory.
The far-reaching questions posed by the six sections of this volume will serve as both a snapshot of Jones Studies as it stands today – including contributions by established authorities on his work, namely Thomas Dilworth, Tom Goldpaugh, Anne Price Owen, and Paul Robichaud – and also open up a range of questions for a new generation of Jones scholars. This volume will remain a standard reference work for Jones scholarship for years to come.
The key historical event around which these ideas coalesce is the 1907 Papal Bull, ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis’ which condemned a range of new intellectual movements under a single heading: ‘modernism’. A recent critical argument has suggested that literary ‘modernism’ – the peer of ‘avant-garde’ in demarking the artistic experimentation that this conference aims to address – took its impetus from a positive appropriation of the term from Catholic discourse. This would suggest that the relationship between Catholicism and the avant-garde could only ever be negative and unidirectional; with the Church lining up as one of the forces from which an artist must liberate him or herself. And yet, while apparently inauspicious for the creative tensions this conference plans to examine, attempts to steer clear of proscribed topics gave rise to wide-ranging discussions of aesthetics within Catholic circles.
Studies over the last decade: Ellis Hanson’s ‘Decadence and Catholicism’, Stephen Schloesser’s ‘Jazz-Age Catholicism’ and Rowan Williams’s ‘Grace and Necessity’ have outlined numerous instances where the relationship between Catholicism and the avant-garde – like that evident between the text and the footnotes in Maritain – has been mutually enriching, often in particular periods: English and French decadence, the interwar French Catholic intellectual scene and the artistic communities centred on Eric Gill at Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin. Recognition of this phenomenon demands a far-reaching revision to the narratives currently told about twentieth-century artistic endeavour and, indeed, a re-consideration of the way in which Catholicism has come to position itself in relation to society.
This one-day conference will initiate the revisionary process by foregrounding the stimulus Catholic thought has provided for experimentation across the arts from the 1890s onwards. Taking up the international resonance of the 'avant-garde', the conference organisers invite paper proposals (300 words) that engage with these issues from a European and global perspective – in the work of figures such as Gaudí, Marechal and Pasolini – as well as those that address the Anglophone and French writers who will serve as the subjects of the keynotes.
Participants may wish (while not being required) to focus on one or more of the following themes:
Single author/ artists/ movements studies including but not limited to: Djuna Barnes, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Bergson, Roy Campbell, G.K. Chesterton, the Ditchling Community, Ernest Dowson, T.S. Eliot, Ronald Firbank, Antoni Gaudí, David Gascoyne, Eric Gill, Graham Greene, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Lionel Johnson, David Jones, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Leopoldo Marechal, Jacques Maritain, Olivier Messiaen, Flannery O'Connor, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Charles Péguy, Ezra Pound, Muriel Spark, Edith Stein, Evelyn Waugh, Simone Weil.
Historical issues: Catholicism and literary decadence; creative responses to Pascendi Dominici Gregis; changes to the notion of an avant-garde Catholicism following Vatican II.
Theoretical consideration: modernism and religion, modernism and decadence, sacramental poetics, theological aesthetics.
Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.
This conference will examine the paradox of Jones the ‘Christian modernist’. Does the very concept of cultural ‘modernism’ perhaps need reassessment when confronted with his example? How is his experimental art, poetry and cultural theory relevant to theology? How does his work relate to the theological controversies of his day, especially the ‘modernist crisis’ within the Catholic church and beyond? How does the influence of other modernist art, theory and literature interact with Christian influences (whether theological or artistic) in his work? What was Jones’s influence upon other thinkers and creative artists, both those who shared his religious views, and those who did not? And is his complex vision of human beings as makers and artists who participate in divine creativity through their sign-making – while also hiding this from themselves – still relevant today? Or should it rather be analysed as a product of its time, an unfortunate idealisation that at one point even led Jones to affirm a limited sympathy for the ‘fascist and Nazi revolutions’?
It is the aim of this conference to confront the paradoxes and pleasures of reading and studying Jones head-on, in order to refine and extend our critical vocabulary to encompass an artist, poet and thinker who continues to challenge our preconceptions. Finally, perspectives that challenge the fruitfulness of the whole idea of Jones as ‘Christian modernist’ are also welcome. Are there reasons for steering clear of both terms? Is Jones’s work perhaps better seen as transcending or collapsing such categories?
Contributions are welcome not only from Jones specialists, but also from across modernist studies, theology, religious studies, philosophy, art history, intellectual and political history, aesthetics, poetics, and genetic manuscript studies.