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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.
France and the Church was a central concern for many writers of the French Catholic literary revival, though it was worked out in a variety of ways. As we have just indicated, some authors associated Nation and Church in such a way as to place the former at the service of the latter. On the other hand, there were some who appeared to mobilise the Church for the rather more earth-bound purposes of the Nation. Saving the French nation France’s role in the world was often seen by Catholic writers in a providential and
This book has so far sought to explore the writings of the French and English Catholic literary revivals in the context of the secularisation of the individual and society. The aim has been to get beyond the limitations of confessional labels and to explore some of their inner dynamics in ways that cast more light on the confrontation between secularisation and resistance to it. One possible objection, however, to the critics of secularisation is that the indices of religiosity in society show that
Literary Revival during the decades leading up to the achievement of partial independence and the partition of the island in 1922, this literature was romantic in its origins. It asserted Ireland’s spiritual superiority to capitalist materialism and claimed that the Irish could provide an alternative to the soulless modernity embodied by Britain. This vision survives to some extent in contemporary Irish writing and in the culture generally. But such romantic and nationalist strains in Irish literature exist alongside disenchantment and pessimism; indeed, the former may
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.
incarnationalism by writers like Huysmans and Péguy ( Chapter 3 ). Theocentrism, however, also explains the paradox that the believer is obliged to create his or her own buffer zone when the social articulators of his theocentric worldview are not available. At the individual level, the violent, reactionary character which Griffiths found at the heart of the French Catholic literary revival, and which marks profoundly a writer like Léon Bloy, may come precisely from this need for counter-buffering. Whether buffering can remain theocentric depends very
that gently but firmly expressed his sympathy with the rioters: ‘The weakness of your position is that nearly all your writers are protestants &, so, liable to get into religious difficulties.’5 Instances such as the Playboy riots illustrate Conor Cruise O’Brien’s assertion that ‘[t]he story of the Irish literary revival in one of its aspects is one of Protestant and Catholic consciousness in intermittent contact, often 137 Anna Pilz leading to increasing mutual distrust’.6 In order to avoid conflict, critics have argued, the Revivalists adhered to two methods
the Parnell myth distorts the closeness between Checkmate and the Home Government Association, and the literary revival’s general rejection of the novel form further downgrades the mid-Victorian preludes to the great crises and achievements of the 1890s. Finally, one recognises in the mature Yeats and the young Joyce an obsessive attention to local style – the ‘scrupulous
occasionally.’72 New Songs was published in Dublin by the small press O’Donoghue & Co., and sold for one and sixpence. Russell was delighted that Gore-Booth had begun to adopt a Celtic manner of writing, insisting that this ‘ought to be natural for you to do so – a West of Ireland woman and Co. Sligo at that.’73 This may have inspired her to write more Celtic-style literature. She began to produce plays which imbue the Celtic literary revival style, while still advocating radical feminist principles. Her first play, Unseen Kings, was published by Longmans Green & Co in 1904
transmitted back to the reader in a rhythmic phrase ironically preserving at the level of systematised chalk marks ‘characters in red, some, and some in black, and others in blue’. 24 That first ‘some’ is the last relic of living human utterance in this necro-narrative. Accounts of the background to the Anglo-Irish literary revival may be criticised precisely for settling for