Modernist Mythopoeia

By: Scott Freer

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Synopsis: Were all Modernists either skeptical or reactionary in matters of Christian belief? How can we express ideas of the sacred distinct from religious commitment? Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of poetic perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. Modernist mythopoeia is a literary means of eschewing the language of certainty while giving voice to the nature and function of transcendence in a post-religious context. As a comparative study, Scott Freer offers fresh readings on a range of key trans-Atlantic modernist texts, whilst considering their various mythopoeic method or vision: Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarauthustra, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Hilda Doolittle's Trilogy, D. H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, and Wallace Stevens' Harmonium. The 'twilight' of modernist mythopoeia is the nuanced and complex way of a godless aesthetic, for it accommodates various shades of secularity and religiosity and brings an inconclusiveness to the mysteries of human existence to be embraced and poeticized. The book is a timely addition to the 'post-secular' debate as well as to the 'return of religion' in modernist studies.