Pub Date : 2021-12-31DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0002
S. Hobson
Chapter 1 explores Vernon Lee’s argument for an ethics of unbelief and her struggle to practice this ethics in literature which, she feared, had an inbuilt tendency to comforting falsehoods. The first part of the chapter outlines Lee’s case against William James and Friedrich Nietzsche whose work, she felt, offered inducements to belief in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Lee shared the view of prominent Rationalists in thinking that James made it possible for his readers to believe in almost anything, except, that is, the arguments of unbelievers. Lee offered ‘responsible unbelief’—belief in the believable—as an altogether more rational, proportionate, and humble alternative to the immoderate and masculinist versions she found in her peers. The final section of this chapter explores Lee’s experimental fiction, Satan the Waster (1918), a genre-defying ‘novel’ in which Lee tests the extent to which imaginative literature can be made to serve a Rationalist agenda. The questions that Lee raises in Satan set the agenda for this book as a whole: given the ease with which language flows into necessary fictions, can literature ever accommodate or encourage unbelief in the strong ethical sense of belief only in the believable? What forms of representation, if any, might be adequate to the expression of a ‘responsible’ unbelief?
{"title":"The Ethics of Unbelief in Vernon Lee and William James","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 1 explores Vernon Lee’s argument for an ethics of unbelief and her struggle to practice this ethics in literature which, she feared, had an inbuilt tendency to comforting falsehoods. The first part of the chapter outlines Lee’s case against William James and Friedrich Nietzsche whose work, she felt, offered inducements to belief in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Lee shared the view of prominent Rationalists in thinking that James made it possible for his readers to believe in almost anything, except, that is, the arguments of unbelievers. Lee offered ‘responsible unbelief’—belief in the believable—as an altogether more rational, proportionate, and humble alternative to the immoderate and masculinist versions she found in her peers. The final section of this chapter explores Lee’s experimental fiction, Satan the Waster (1918), a genre-defying ‘novel’ in which Lee tests the extent to which imaginative literature can be made to serve a Rationalist agenda. The questions that Lee raises in Satan set the agenda for this book as a whole: given the ease with which language flows into necessary fictions, can literature ever accommodate or encourage unbelief in the strong ethical sense of belief only in the believable? What forms of representation, if any, might be adequate to the expression of a ‘responsible’ unbelief?","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123607662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-31DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0004
S. Hobson
Chapter 3 examines the interwar revival and transformation of a genre that had a Rationalist agenda inbuilt: New Testament biofiction or, in Graham Holderness’s words, the Jesus-novel. Following in the wake of Higher Criticism, this enormously popular genre mixed biography and fiction in its retelling of the life and death of Jesus, a process that often reduced Christ to man rather than god, and the Gospels to literature rather than scripture. This chapter emphasizes the influence of George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916) on later versions of the Jesus-novel by D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Mary Borden, and Iwan Nashiwin. Moore’s version emphasizes the virtues of oral presentation as a means of getting the story straight; his vernacular approach sought to cut through the rhetorical tricks and literary seductions that disguised the truth of Jesus’s life and death on the cross. Lawrence and H.D. adopt a more heavily symbolic and stylized prose in their New Testament stories but do so with similar ends in mind. In engaging with the events of Jesus’s life, and especially those connected to the crucifixion and resurrection, these authors foreground questions of belief in a way that stories based on other historical and mythological lives do not. More pointedly, this chapter argues, they counter the popular view of unbelief as a recent or modern development by locating its origins at the very beginnings of Christianity itself.
{"title":"The ‘Death of God’ in New Testament Biofiction","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 examines the interwar revival and transformation of a genre that had a Rationalist agenda inbuilt: New Testament biofiction or, in Graham Holderness’s words, the Jesus-novel. Following in the wake of Higher Criticism, this enormously popular genre mixed biography and fiction in its retelling of the life and death of Jesus, a process that often reduced Christ to man rather than god, and the Gospels to literature rather than scripture. This chapter emphasizes the influence of George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916) on later versions of the Jesus-novel by D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Mary Borden, and Iwan Nashiwin. Moore’s version emphasizes the virtues of oral presentation as a means of getting the story straight; his vernacular approach sought to cut through the rhetorical tricks and literary seductions that disguised the truth of Jesus’s life and death on the cross. Lawrence and H.D. adopt a more heavily symbolic and stylized prose in their New Testament stories but do so with similar ends in mind. In engaging with the events of Jesus’s life, and especially those connected to the crucifixion and resurrection, these authors foreground questions of belief in a way that stories based on other historical and mythological lives do not. More pointedly, this chapter argues, they counter the popular view of unbelief as a recent or modern development by locating its origins at the very beginnings of Christianity itself.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124075772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-31DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0006
S. Hobson
Chapter 5 examines Naomi Mitchison’s claim to be a Rationalist heretic and her attempts to reshape Rationalist priorities and values to better serve a new generation of left-leaning and feminist unbelievers such as herself. Mitchison was a life-long member of the Rationalist Press Association, though not always supportive of its aims. In articles and speeches, some of which were published in the RPA journal, she argued for a realignment of Rationalism to bring it closer to socialism, on the one hand, and, curiously, religion on the other. This was not, this chapter argues, a wholesale abandonment of Rationalist principles, especially not those concerning the limits of human knowledge. On the contrary, Mitchison re-orientates Rationalism in the direction of a speculative humanism that goes beyond the confines of scientific naturalism without sacrificing the primacy of human reason to some other, extra-human or godlike, way of knowing. This chapter turns to Beyond This Limit, the short novel Mitchison co-created with Wyndham Lewis, to explore the working out of her philosophy in fiction. Beyond This Limit posits the existence of an afterlife but in such a way as to suggest, that if this is to be a legitimate and rational form of conjecture, then the afterlife can only be imagined as an extension of the conditions of mortality—as a form of living on.
第五章探讨了Naomi Mitchison自称为理性主义异端，以及她试图重塑理性主义的优先级和价值观，以更好地服务于像她这样的左倾和女权主义不信仰者的新一代。米奇逊是理性主义新闻协会的终身会员，尽管他并不总是支持该协会的宗旨。在一些发表在RPA杂志上的文章和演讲中，她主张重新调整理性主义，一方面使其更接近社会主义，另一方面，奇怪的是，更接近宗教。本章认为，这并不是对理性主义原则的全盘抛弃，尤其是对那些涉及人类知识极限的原则。相反，米奇逊将理性主义重新定位在一种思辨的人文主义的方向上，这种人文主义超越了科学自然主义的界限，而不牺牲人类理性的首要地位，以某种其他的、超人类的或神一般的认识方式。本章将转向与温德姆·刘易斯共同创作的短篇小说《超越极限》(Beyond This Limit)，探讨她的小说哲学。超越这一极限假设了来世的存在，但以这样一种方式暗示，如果这是一种合法和合理的猜测形式，那么来世只能被想象为死亡条件的延伸——作为一种生存形式。
{"title":"Naomi Mitchison’s Rationalist ‘Heresy’ and Speculative Humanism in Beyond This Limit","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 5 examines Naomi Mitchison’s claim to be a Rationalist heretic and her attempts to reshape Rationalist priorities and values to better serve a new generation of left-leaning and feminist unbelievers such as herself. Mitchison was a life-long member of the Rationalist Press Association, though not always supportive of its aims. In articles and speeches, some of which were published in the RPA journal, she argued for a realignment of Rationalism to bring it closer to socialism, on the one hand, and, curiously, religion on the other. This was not, this chapter argues, a wholesale abandonment of Rationalist principles, especially not those concerning the limits of human knowledge. On the contrary, Mitchison re-orientates Rationalism in the direction of a speculative humanism that goes beyond the confines of scientific naturalism without sacrificing the primacy of human reason to some other, extra-human or godlike, way of knowing. This chapter turns to Beyond This Limit, the short novel Mitchison co-created with Wyndham Lewis, to explore the working out of her philosophy in fiction. Beyond This Limit posits the existence of an afterlife but in such a way as to suggest, that if this is to be a legitimate and rational form of conjecture, then the afterlife can only be imagined as an extension of the conditions of mortality—as a form of living on.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115371369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-31DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0003
S. Hobson
Chapter 2 presents H. G. Wells as the most famous case of a lapsed unbeliever in the interwar period and explores the impact of Wells’s ‘theological excursion’ on his wartime fiction. Wells conceived of an idiosyncratic version of ‘God’ that might explain, and offer consolation for, the existence of evil as seen in what would become its characteristic twentieth-century form in the First World War. Wells presented his theology in books of philosophy and novels which quickly became a target for Rationalist derision and ire. Wells responded in kind, answering his critics in letters to the Rationalist press and even including the most famous of his opponents as a character in The Undying Fire (1919). This chapter suggests that Wells’s argument with Rationalism gave direction and purpose to his literary experiments at this time. In Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and The Soul of a Bishop (1917) he moved decisively away from the example set by modernist fiction to a ‘spread-out’ form capable of addressing the paradox of evil. In The Undying Fire, he thought he had perfected both his fictional method and his theodicy. Described by Wells as a frank rewrite of the Book of Job, the novel presents Wells’s minimal theology in a form that no one could mistake for modernism.
{"title":"H. G. Wells’s ‘Theological Excursion’ and the Dialogue Novel","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 2 presents H. G. Wells as the most famous case of a lapsed unbeliever in the interwar period and explores the impact of Wells’s ‘theological excursion’ on his wartime fiction. Wells conceived of an idiosyncratic version of ‘God’ that might explain, and offer consolation for, the existence of evil as seen in what would become its characteristic twentieth-century form in the First World War. Wells presented his theology in books of philosophy and novels which quickly became a target for Rationalist derision and ire. Wells responded in kind, answering his critics in letters to the Rationalist press and even including the most famous of his opponents as a character in The Undying Fire (1919). This chapter suggests that Wells’s argument with Rationalism gave direction and purpose to his literary experiments at this time. In Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and The Soul of a Bishop (1917) he moved decisively away from the example set by modernist fiction to a ‘spread-out’ form capable of addressing the paradox of evil. In The Undying Fire, he thought he had perfected both his fictional method and his theodicy. Described by Wells as a frank rewrite of the Book of Job, the novel presents Wells’s minimal theology in a form that no one could mistake for modernism.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125667077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-31DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0007
S. Hobson
The final chapter provides an account of Soma (1931–4), the only little magazine from the period seemingly dedicated to the production and dissemination of a transnational literature of unbelief. The editor, K. S. Bhat, had links to the Rationalist Press Association as well as to progressive literary groups in London and India and these connections are manifest in the magazine’s hybridized literary style. This chapter explores some of Soma’s sources and influences from Indian literature and folklore, to Soviet realisms, and Anglophone modernisms. As Johannes Quack suggests in relation to his own work, the point of this approach is not to impose European values on Indian cultures, but to show how new formations of unbelief emerge at the point where different traditions intersect. In Soma, these formations often overlap with those seen in the British Rationalist context; the magazine gives priority to human values and flourishing over and above religious sensitivities and sanctions. But the magazine’s close affiliation with Eastern European and Indian sources and groups also produces new and distinctive formations. This chapter focuses on the parables and fables contributed by Bhat himself as exemplary of the magazine’s unique voice and contribution. Soma is a fitting place to end this book because, in both its conception and realization, the magazine extends the reach and the remit of what has thus far been considered under the heading of a literature of unbelief.
最后一章讲述了《Soma》(1931-4)的故事，这是那个时期唯一一本似乎致力于制作和传播非信仰跨国文学的小杂志。编辑k·s·巴特(K. S. Bhat)与理性主义新闻协会(Rationalist Press Association)以及伦敦和印度的进步文学团体都有联系，这些联系体现在该杂志混杂的文学风格上。本章探讨了Soma的一些来源和影响，从印度文学和民间传说，到苏联现实主义，英语国家的现代主义。正如Johannes Quack在他自己的作品中提出的那样，这种方法的重点不是将欧洲价值观强加给印度文化，而是展示在不同传统相交的地方，新的不信仰形式是如何出现的。在Soma中，这些形式经常与英国理性主义背景中的形式重叠;该杂志将人类价值和繁荣置于宗教敏感性和制裁之上。但该杂志与东欧和印度来源和团体的密切联系也产生了新的和独特的形式。本章着重于巴特本人所创作的比喻和寓言，作为该杂志独特的声音和贡献的典范。Soma是这本书的一个合适的结尾，因为在它的概念和实现上，这本杂志扩展了迄今为止被认为是在无信仰文学的标题下的范围和范围。
{"title":"K. S. Bhat, Soma, and a Transnational Literature of Unbelief","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The final chapter provides an account of Soma (1931–4), the only little magazine from the period seemingly dedicated to the production and dissemination of a transnational literature of unbelief. The editor, K. S. Bhat, had links to the Rationalist Press Association as well as to progressive literary groups in London and India and these connections are manifest in the magazine’s hybridized literary style. This chapter explores some of Soma’s sources and influences from Indian literature and folklore, to Soviet realisms, and Anglophone modernisms. As Johannes Quack suggests in relation to his own work, the point of this approach is not to impose European values on Indian cultures, but to show how new formations of unbelief emerge at the point where different traditions intersect. In Soma, these formations often overlap with those seen in the British Rationalist context; the magazine gives priority to human values and flourishing over and above religious sensitivities and sanctions. But the magazine’s close affiliation with Eastern European and Indian sources and groups also produces new and distinctive formations. This chapter focuses on the parables and fables contributed by Bhat himself as exemplary of the magazine’s unique voice and contribution. Soma is a fitting place to end this book because, in both its conception and realization, the magazine extends the reach and the remit of what has thus far been considered under the heading of a literature of unbelief.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130076414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-31DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0008
S. Hobson
The conclusion describes the development of secularist publishing since the Second World War, noting significant points of intersection with debates over literature and free speech. It looks at the afterlife of the modernist secular-sacred compromise and shows how for some post-war writers and intellectuals faith found renewed purpose in fiction while unbelief did not. The conclusion revisits some of the rich fictional experiments seen in previous chapters to challenge the modernist idea still active in these contexts—that unbelief is necessarily monologic, unironic, and thereby fundamentally unliterary.
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The conclusion describes the development of secularist publishing since the Second World War, noting significant points of intersection with debates over literature and free speech. It looks at the afterlife of the modernist secular-sacred compromise and shows how for some post-war writers and intellectuals faith found renewed purpose in fiction while unbelief did not. The conclusion revisits some of the rich fictional experiments seen in previous chapters to challenge the modernist idea still active in these contexts—that unbelief is necessarily monologic, unironic, and thereby fundamentally unliterary.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125942909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-31DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0005
S. Hobson
Mary Butts is an outlier among the writers discussed in this book because of her deep-felt religiosity and equally deep-felt scepticism towards modern expressions of unbelief. Yet, of all these figures, she was the most knowledgeable in the contemporary literature of unbelief and the only writer to mention ‘rationalist press stuff’ explicitly in a work of fiction. This chapter argues that Butts made her own contribution to this literature in the form of Traps for Unbelievers (1932), a study of the error made by modern unbelievers when they insist on ‘truth’ as the minimum requirement for belief. It then moves on to Butts’s own ‘strong’ understanding of belief in belief and examines the working out of this concept in novels and short supernatural stories from the late 1920s and 1930s. Butts suggests that a weakening in the human belief system left by the failure of Christianity needed to be compensated for by a strengthening elsewhere. This chapter argues she used her fiction as a testing ground for possible sources of new conviction and for the nature and degree of belief that could be borne by modern fiction and, by extension, the modern world at large.
{"title":"Mary Butts and ‘Belief in Belief’ in Traps for Unbelievers and Supernatural Stories","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Mary Butts is an outlier among the writers discussed in this book because of her deep-felt religiosity and equally deep-felt scepticism towards modern expressions of unbelief. Yet, of all these figures, she was the most knowledgeable in the contemporary literature of unbelief and the only writer to mention ‘rationalist press stuff’ explicitly in a work of fiction. This chapter argues that Butts made her own contribution to this literature in the form of Traps for Unbelievers (1932), a study of the error made by modern unbelievers when they insist on ‘truth’ as the minimum requirement for belief. It then moves on to Butts’s own ‘strong’ understanding of belief in belief and examines the working out of this concept in novels and short supernatural stories from the late 1920s and 1930s. Butts suggests that a weakening in the human belief system left by the failure of Christianity needed to be compensated for by a strengthening elsewhere. This chapter argues she used her fiction as a testing ground for possible sources of new conviction and for the nature and degree of belief that could be borne by modern fiction and, by extension, the modern world at large.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133226891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：