Introduction: The heretical vintage of modernism -- Part I: The academy of modern heretics. A society of heretics; The early years of the Cambridge heretics, 1910-14; Aesthetics and the modern heretics -- Part II: Modernist literary heresies. Canonical transformations; Literary paganism and the heresy of syncretism; Fictions, figurative heresy, and the roots of English -- After words: The "empires of the mind" and the control of heresy -- Appendix: Meetings of the Heretics Society, Cambridge, 1909-24
Summary
"In Modernist Heresies, Damon Franke presents the discourse of heresy as central to the intellectual history of the origins of British modernism. The book examines heretical discourses from literature and culture of the fin de siecle and the Edwardian period in order to establish continuities between Victorian blasphemy and modernist obscenity by tracing the dialectic of heresy and orthodoxy, and the pragmatic shifting of both heterodox and authoritative discourses." "Franke documents the untold history of the Cambridge Heretics Society and places the concerns of this discussion society in dialogue with contemporaneous literature by such authors as Pater, Hardy, Shaw, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Orwell. Since several highly influential figures of the modernist literati were members of the Heretics or in dialogue with the group, heresy and its relation to synthesis now become crucial to an understanding of modernist aesthetics and ethics."--Jacket
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-250) and index
