Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Angels of Modernism pp 1–33Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology

  • Chapter

  • 139 Accesses

Abstract

This book is about angels and the many and various ways they are represented in modernist literary cultures. A curious assortment, they range from the awe-inspiring (D.H. Lawrence’s ‘winged and staring creatures… quivering their wings across space’1) to the mundane (Wallace Stevens’s ‘necessary angel of earth’2); the messianic (Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’) to the profane (Djuna Barnes’s ‘angels on all fours… drinking at the water hole of the damned’3); the futuristic (Wyndham Lewis’s science-fiction angels) to the old-fashioned (Virginia Woolf’s Angel in the House4); and the clichéd (H.D.’s ‘common-or-garden’ angels5) to the downright bizarre (H.D.’s ‘raspberry shaped ridiculous small angel’6). Modernism is by no means exceptional among historical periods and cultures in offering a plethora of angels for study. But it does provide particular interest as a background against which these angels are brought out in sharp relief. Angels appear regularly in contradistinction both to modernism’s much discussed hostility to traditional religious pieties and its campaign against unnecessary and ornamental figuration in literature. These figures continue to perform significant cultural work even as they are identified as incongruous and untimely: the creation of a previous age of faith or the products of a sentimental Victorian imagination.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 83.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Wallace Stevens, ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 423.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, in Selected Works of Djuna Barnes (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 307.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), pp. 149–54 (p. 150).

    Google Scholar 

  5. HD, Tribute to Freud/Writing on the Wall/Advent (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), p. 55.

    Google Scholar 

  6. See David Albert Jones, Angels: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 54.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Wallace Stevens, ‘Two or Three Ideas’, in Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates, rev. edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), pp. 257–67 (p. 259).

    Google Scholar 

  8. See Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 129–56 (p. 155); James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement, ed. Robert Frazer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976); and Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Mass Psychology and Other Writings, trans. J.A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2004).

    Google Scholar 

  9. Georg Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen and trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 17–46 (p. 44).

    Google Scholar 

  10. George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 12, A Patriot After All 1940–1941 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998), pp. 86–115 (p. 97). I am indebted to Pericles Lewis for this second reference. See Pericles Lewis, ‘Churchgoing in the Modern Novel’, Modernism/Modernity, 11 (2004), 669–94 (p. 687).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 119–20.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 22.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (New York: Mondial, 2006), p. 9.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Peter Berger notes that ‘the “secularization theory” was coined in the 1950s though its core idea has older antecedents’. See Berger, Religious America, Secular Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 141.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England 1850–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), p. 5.

    Google Scholar 

  16. See Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 17 and McLeod, Religion and Society, pp. 211–12.

    Google Scholar 

  17. See Berger, Religious America; Grace Davies, Europe: The Exceptional Case: The Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002); and David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 20.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), pp. 12–13, 26.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Michael Warner, Introduction to Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge MA: Harvard, 2010), pp. 2–25 (p. 16).

    Google Scholar 

  20. Peter J. Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth- Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 3.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  21. Stevens, ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, in Collected Poetry, p. 423; and Carl G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 13, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler and others (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 82.

    Google Scholar 

  22. For a comprehensive description of some of the occult interests and investments of writers in London in the early years of the twentieth century, see Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University, 1993); James Logenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas 1880–1890 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973); and Timothy Materer, Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Helen Sword suggests that over the course of the last decade there has been an explosion in the number of books considering modernism, spiritualism and the occult. She lists some of what she considers to be the most important publications in Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 160.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, see e.g. pp. 3, 7, 13; and Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  24. See Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Jeff Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  25. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), pp. 12–13.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  26. Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 22, 38.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Gregory E. Erickson, The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), especially pp. 3–4; and Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 173.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  28. See Owen, The Place of Enchantment, p. 12; Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, pp. xi-xii; Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), p. xvi; Lewis, Religious Experience, p. 25; Erickson, Absence of God, p. 3; and Philip Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2005), pp. 2–3.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Ezra Pound, Make it New (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935). The phrase itself is not new but borrowed from Confucious.

    Google Scholar 

  30. D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), pp. 83, 120.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 245–55; W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 68; Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998); and Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches (London: Royal National Theatre and Nick Hern, 1992) and Part Two: Perestroika (London: Royal National Theatre and Nick Hern, 1994).

    Google Scholar 

  32. Anguéliki Garidis, Les anges du désir: figures de l’ange au XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), p. 265.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Benjamin in Hope’, Critical Inquiry, 25 (1999), 344–52 (p. 346).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Angels feature prominently in Luce Irigary’s call for a female ‘divine made in her own image’ because of their position in-between heaven and earth. Neither God nor man, these figures interrupt the logic of the Same which underpins the idea of God the Father and introduce instead a logic of difference. Irigary’s illustration is the two angels who face each other over the Ark of the Covenant in Exodus: face-to-face, these angels cannot replace one another, nor fuse into the One of the male Imaginary. See Irigaray, ‘Belief Itself’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 25–53 (p. 44).

    Google Scholar 

  35. R.M.M. Tuschling, Angels and Orthodoxy: A Study in their Development in Syria and Palestine from the Qumran Texts to Ephrem the Syrian (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), p. 37.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 12.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  37. Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1961), pp. 43–4.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth [1948], ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 79.

    Google Scholar 

  39. R.H. Charles, Introduction to The Book of Enoch the Prophet, trans. Richard Laurence (London: Kegan, Paul and Trench, 1883), p. xxxv; and Allen Upward, ‘The Son of Man’, New Age, 6:13 (27 January 1910), pp. 298–9 (p. 299).

    Google Scholar 

  40. Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels including the Fallen Angels (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. xxviii; and Gustav Davidson to H.D. (2 August 1960), H.D. Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library [subsequently abbreviated to YCAL], Mss 24, fol. 302. Davidson’s reading list includes both R.H. Charles’s translation of 1 Enoch and Moses Gaster’s The Sword of Moses. Published in 1896, this second book is again the result of a late nineteenth-century discovery. Gaster describes how he had the ‘good fortune’ to discover a thirteenth or fourteenth century Hebrew manuscript, which he argues is a copy of an ancient text.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 37.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Karen Armstrong, A History of God (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 117.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Peter O’Leary, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p. 29.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Plato, The Republic, ed. G.R.F. Ferrari and trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 337–45.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Plato, ‘Ion’, in Five Dialogues of Plato bearing on Poetic Inspiration, trans. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Floyer Sydenham, Henry Cary and others (London: J.M. Dent, [1910]), pp. 1–16 (p. 6).

    Google Scholar 

  46. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 71–3.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Jacqueline Rose and others, ‘Memories of Frank Kermode’, London Review of Books, 32:18 (23 September 2010), 9–11 (p. 10).

    Google Scholar 

  48. Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing the Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 37.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Gail Ashton, ‘Bridging the Difference: Reconceptualizing the Angel in Medieval Hagiography’, Literature and Theology, 16 (2002), 235–47 (p. 238).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 19.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  51. Richard Aldington to Edward Nehls (18 January 1952), in D.H. Lawrence; A Composite Biography, Vol. 1, 1885–1919, ed. Nehls (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 569, n25; also quoted in Peter E. Firchow, ‘Rico and Julia: The Hilda Doolittle-D.H. Lawrence Affair Reconsidered’, Journal of Modern Literature, 8 (1980), 51–76 (p. 75).

    Google Scholar 

  52. C.W. Leadbeater, A Textbook of Theosophy (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1941), p. 105.

    Google Scholar 

  53. H.P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1946), p. 103.

    Google Scholar 

  54. H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1938), pp. 318–19.

    Google Scholar 

  55. See for example D.H. Lawrence ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. Macdonald (London: Heineman, 1936), pp. 398–516 (p. 432).

    Google Scholar 

  56. Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams (24 October 1907), quoted in Surette, Birth of Modernism, p. 130–1; and W. B. Yeats, A Vision and Related Writings, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Arena, 1990), p. 75.

    Google Scholar 

  57. See Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 29–31; and Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  58. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 19.

    Google Scholar 

  59. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans and Green, 1898), p. 358.

    Google Scholar 

  60. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (London: Penguin, 1990), Book VII, lines 1824–7, p. 37. Quoted in Nina Auerbach, Women and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 72–3.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Julie Straight, ‘“Neither keeping either under”: Gender and Vice in Elizabeth Barrett’s The Seraphim’, Victorian Poetry, 38 (2000), 269–88 (p. 269).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 47–8.

    Google Scholar 

  63. Lawrence to Ottoline Morell (9 September 1915), in Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol. 2, June 1913-October 1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 390; and Wyndham Lewis, The Human Age, Book 2, Monstre Gai (London: John Calder, 1955).

    Google Scholar 

  64. George Buday, The History of the Christmas Card (London: Rockliff, 1954), p. 187.

    Google Scholar 

  65. Carolyn Forche, The Angel of History (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994), p. 81.

    Google Scholar 

  66. Franz Kafka, Diaries 1914–1923, ed. Max Brod (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), pp. 62–4.

    Google Scholar 

  67. David Savran, ‘Ambivalence, Utopia and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How Angels in America Reconstructs the Nation’, Theatre Journal, 47 (1995), 207–27, p. 213.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. O.K. Werckmeister, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian’, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, ed. Peter Osborne, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 412–40 (p. 414).

    Google Scholar 

  69. Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 8.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queen Mary, University of London, UK

    Suzanne Hobson (Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature)

Authors
  1. Suzanne Hobson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2011 Suzanne Hobson

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hobson, S. (2011). Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology. In: Angels of Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349643_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation