Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh

Abstract

The introduction traces the intellectual history of resurrection from the Hellenistic era through the Reformation and up to the advent of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. To make the idea of resurrection more compatible with an emerging secular modernity it is gradually modified in the direction of dualism by positing a detachable soul that lives on after death. But the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh lives on as an oppositional discourse that challenges key institutions of an emerging secular modernity including the models of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency it assumes and privileges. The critical potential of the residual idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh is most evident in the most experimental poetry of the century, which I argue anticipates the avant-garde poetry of the early twentieth century theorized by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. The formally experimental poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson is a tool for bringing to light a deranging experience of being vibrant matter at the heart of the socialized self.