Bloomsbury Academic Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism

Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - 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 modernism. Linking the later writers with their literary forebears, 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. Review "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 About the Author Martin Lockerd is Assistant Professor of English at Schreiner University, USA. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin. he has taught several literature courses that incorporated late-Victorian and Modernist literature, including a course on Modern and Contemporary Poetry. He has published four articles on the relationship between decadent and modernist literature: one in The Yeats/Eliot Review,two in The Journal of Modern Literature, and one in Modern Fiction Studies.