Modernism and Religion

Callison’s study is a valuable resource both for students of literary modernism who have observed the persistence of religious questions and influences in the modernist period and for students of practical theology, particularly those of us who continue to experience and explore the appeal of various forms of retreat in our own time. Indeed, Callison’s categories of spilt mysticism and wavering orthodoxy provide helpful frameworks to consider the role of Christian spirituality in the arts and religious practices, not only in historical studies but also in contemporary developments and innovations. -- Kathleen Henderson Staudt * Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality *
Callison’s book offers significant original insights into the contested status of both orthodox and mystical religion in the early 20th century. That very historical slipperiness of the term mysticism might raise the question of its utility as an analytical category in the present: does modernist studies’ continued deployment of the term—whether referring to given religious traditions, trans-cultural religious phenomena, or secularized forms of either—risk displacing assumptions baked into this category onto literary texts? For religious and literary studies scholars probing such issues, “Modernism and Religion’s” attentive, thought-provoking analyses will be essential reading—and to rethink orthodoxies alongside Callison’s book is sure to be an illuminating experience. -- Graham Borland * Reading Religion *
A perceptive, absorbing, irreplaceable study. In showing how modernist writing was shaped by an interplay between the claims of mysticism as individual experience and the benefits of ecclesiastical frameworks, Callison illuminates a rich seam of innovation and perplexity not just in Jones, Eliot and H.D. but in the broader life of early twentieth-century Christianity. -- Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University