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This book is a comparative study of the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches that tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, this book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. The book also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes which are considered to be emblematic of the Catholic literature.
This book explores at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches that tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, the book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. The book also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes that are considered to be emblematic of Catholic literature. Its breadth will make it a useful guide for students wishing to become familiar with a wide range of such writings in France and England during this period.
. Retté’s sense of transgression implies not a self-hating guilt but the discovery that the purpose of his liberty is to fulfil a divinely defined destiny. Such views find their parallel among the English Catholic writers who, like Retté, have decadent associations. The closest of these to Retté is perhaps the poet Lionel Johnson, whose attitude to sin and repentance is captured by his poem ‘Ash Wednesday’: ‘Here is the healing place / And here the place of peace / Sorrow is sweet with grace / Here, and here sin hath cease.’ 13 Retté
, unmannered, unadorned, or, indeed, so-called ‘manly’? 100 Thus when Lionel Johnson insisted of Pater that ‘his Euphuism, if that be not too suspect a word, was no dreamy toying with rich and strange expressions’, he acknowledged that for many of his readers euphuism was indeed thought to be something rich
League of Great Britain and Ireland with a clearer defined political aim of the Stuart restoration.84 Gregory’s mixed phrase, including both ‘League’ and ‘White Rose’, could be a reference to either one of these organisations. Yet it clearly indicates her awareness of more politically inclined Jacobite ideologies prevalent at the time. Some of the key literary figures of the 1890s had Jacobite sympathies, including McGregor Mathers and Lionel Johnson. It is in regard to the latter two, and the circle of the Rhymers Club, that Yeats was also acquainted with such
writers. Thus, soundings from works by Paul Verlaine and Francis Jammes, as well as from those by Francis Thompson and Alice Meynell, will be analysed. English Catholic poetry, moreover, presents us with an intriguing strand of decadence in the works of Edward Dowson, John Gray and Lionel Johnson. Controversialists find their place here too. In France, we should mention Agathon (Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde), Maurice Barrès, Edouard Drumont and Charles Maurras. Maurras and Barrès are of course much more than controversialists, but, as
-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Humble, Nicola (2001) The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Lionel Pigot (1915) ‘Brontë’, Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson, London: Elkin Mathews. Kontou, Tatiana (2009) Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Linton, M.B. (c.1926) The Tragic Race: A Play about the Brontës, Aberdeen: W. and W. Lindsay. Matthews, Samantha (2004
, resulting in the same blur, which only the vigour of the colours fixes’ (Eliot 1920a , 24). That suggestive blurring is an example of what Pound might have identified as ‘crepuscular’ or, in his essay ‘Lionel Johnson’, as late Victorian ‘muzziness’: ‘The “nineties” have chiefly gone out because of their muzziness, because of a softness derived, I think, not from books but
perversion, morbidity, ennui and spiritual malaise. In this novel, the British found a happy medium between naturalism and aestheticism. However, due to a cautious publishing industry, writers such as George Moore (1852– 1933), Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), Arthur Symonds (1865–1945) and Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) introduced decadence to the British public in the late 1880s in critical essays. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) was the first British attempt to garner mass public attention, as well as a harsh critical rebuke. Kirsten MacLeod writes, ‘Decadence