Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel PDF Author: Pericles Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521856507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel PDF Author: Pericles Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521856507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience PDF Author: Patrick McNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139483560
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Technical advances in the life and medical sciences have revolutionised our understanding of the brain, while the emerging disciplines of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience continue to reveal the connections of the higher cognitive functions and emotional states associated with religious experience to underlying brain states. At the same time, a host of developing theories in psychology and anthropology posit evolutionary explanations for the ubiquity and persistence of religious beliefs and the reports of religious experiences across human cultures, while gesturing toward physical bases for these behaviours. What is missing from this literature is a strong voice speaking to these behavioural and social scientists - as well as to the intellectually curious in the religious studies community - from the perspective of a brain scientist.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience PDF Author: William James
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1877527467
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 824

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Book Description
Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology

The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology PDF Author: Charles Andrews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350362042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

Restless Secularism

Restless Secularism PDF Author: Matthew Mutter
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300227965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A scholarly and deeply sensitive study that explores how religion and secularism are tightly interwoven in the major works of modernist literature Matthew Mutter provides a broad survey of modernist literature, examining key works against a background of philosophy, theology, intellectual and social history, while tracing the relationship of modernism’s secular imagination to the religious cultures that both preceded and shaped it. Mutter’s provocative study demonstrates how, despite their explicit desire to purify secular life of its religious residues, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and other literary modernists consistently found themselves entangled in the religious legacies they disavowed.

My Bright Abyss

My Bright Abyss PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374216789
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry

Modernist Reformations

Modernist Reformations PDF Author: Stephen Sicari
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1638040257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
“Religion” has become suspect in literary studies, often for good reason, as it has become associated with reactionary politics and outdated codified beliefs. In Modernist Reformations: Poetry as Theology in Eliot, Stevens, and Joyce, the author demonstrates how three high modernist writers work to reform religious experience for an age dominated by the extremes of radical skepticism and dogmatic rigidity. The author offers new and provocative readings of these well-studied writers: Joyce and Stevens are usually considered purely secular, and the Eliot in this book is more progressive than reactionary. The readings here provide a fresh approach to their work and to the period. Using studies of religious experience by sociologists and theologians both from the modernist era and from our own contemporary world to frame the argument, the author examines the poetry closely and in detail to demonstrate that the work of these writers does not merely reflect religious themes and issues but does the actual work usually considered theological. Their poetry is theology. Modernist Reformations will renew and deepen appreciation for these writers, and perhaps their efforts at reformation may allow for our own engagement with religion in a secular age.

Before Religion

Before Religion PDF Author: Brent Nongbri
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature PDF Author: Ulrika Maude
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1780936559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
In this book, leading international scholars explore the major ideas and debates that have made the study of modernist literature one of the most vibrant areas of literary studies today. The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature offers a comprehensive guide to current research in the field, covering topics including: · The modernist everyday: emotion, myth, geographies and language scepticism · Modernist literature and the arts: music, the visual arts, cinema and popular culture · Textual and archival approaches: manuscripts, genetic criticism and modernist magazines · Modernist literature and science: sexology, neurology, psychology, technology and the theory of relativity · The geopolitics of modernism: globalization, politics and economics · Resources: keywords and an annotated bibliography

Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

Varieties of Aesthetic Experience PDF Author: Craig Bradshaw Woelfel
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611179068
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
An exploration of belief as an experience, both secular and religious, through the study of major literary works At the height of modernism in the 1920s, what did it mean to believe and how was it experienced? Craig Woelfel seeks to answer this pivotal question in Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and Dissociation of Belief, a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between secular modernity and religious engagement. Woelfel hinges his argument on the unlikely comparison of two revered modern writers: T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster. They had vastly different experiences with religion, as Eliot converted to Christianity later in life and Forster became a steadfast nonbeliever over time, but Woelfel contends that their stories offer a compelling model for belief as broken and ambivalent rather than constant. Narratives of faith—its loss or gain—are no longer linear but instead are just as fractured and varied as the modernists themselves. Drawing from Eliot's and Forster's major and minor creative and critical works, Woelfel makes the case for a "dissociation of belief" during the modern era—a separation of emotional and spiritual religious experience from its reduction to forms. He contextualizes belief in the modern era alongside modernist religious studies scholarship and current secularization theory, with particular attention to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of religious engagement at the time. In Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, Woelfel considers major literary works—including Eliot's The Waste Land and Forster's A Passage to India—as well as the Cambridge Clark Lectures and previously unstudied personal writings from both authors. The volume revolves around a line from Eliot himself, from a lecture in which he said that he wanted "to see art, and to see it whole." Rather than excluding belief from the conversation, Woelfel contends that modernist art can become a critical liminal space for exploring what it means to believe in a secular age.