Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rzepa, Joanna

Titel

Spaces of Encounter: Theological Modernism and Neo-scholasticism in Literature and Literary Criticism

Ist Teil von

• Modernism and Theology, p.137-193

Ort / Verlag

Cham: Springer International Publishing

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter discusses the exchanges between the fields of theology, literature, and literary criticism in the early twentieth century. It shows that issues related to the modernist controversy in theology were readily addressed by European authors. This includes Antonio Fogazzaro’s novel The Saint (Il Santo, 1906) and Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti’s novel Jesse and Maria (Jesse und Maria, 1905/1906), which were read, analysed, and debated by readers and theologians on both sides of the ongoing dispute between modernism and neo-scholasticism. The second part of the chapter examines the interface between theology and literary criticism. It discusses ways in which terminology that originated in the debates between modernist and neo-Thomist theologians was adopted by critics such as T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot. It also analyses modernist theologians’ concerns about the perceived exhaustion of theological idiom, and demonstrates how poetic language came to be seen as a source of its potential renewal. The modernist Henri Bremond’s theory of ‘pure poetry’ posited an affinity between mystical and poetic experience, which was criticised by the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, triggering a heated debate among literary critics, poets, and religious intellectuals across Europe.