Until fairly recently, the 'Authorized Version' of cultural modernism stated that the secularizing trends of liberal modernity - and the resultant emphasis on irony, parody and dissolution in modernist artforms - had pushed religion to the edges of early twentieth-century culture. This Companion complicates this 'Authorized Version' by furnishing students and academic researchers with more nuanced and probing assessments of the intersections - and tensions - between religion, myth and creativity during this half century of geopolitical ferment. The Companion addresses the variety and specificity of modernist spiritualities; as well as the intricately textured and shifting standpoints that modernist figures have occupied in relation to theological traditions, practices, creeds, and institutions. What emerges is a multi-textured account of modernism's deep-rooted concern with the historical and established forms of religion as well as new engagements with 'occulture' and indigenous traditions. In short, this Companion supplies a lively and original introduction to the aesthetic, publishing, technological and philosophical trends that shape debates about spirituality, community and self from the 1890s to the 1940s and beyond.

This volume offers a new account of the relationship between literary and secularist scenes of writing in interwar Britain. Organized secularism has sometimes been seen as a phenomenon that lived and died with the nineteenth century. But associations such as the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association survived into the twentieth and found new purpose in the promotion and publishing of serious literature. This book assembles a group of literary figures whose work was recommended as being of particular interest to the unbelieving readership targeted by these organisations. Some, including Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, Naomi Mitchison, and K.S. Bhat, were members or friends of the R.P.A.; others, such as Mary Butts, were sceptical but nonetheless registered its importance in their work; a third group, including D.H. Lawrence and George Moore, wrote in ways seen as sympathetic to the Rationalist cause. All of these writers produced fiction that was experimental in form and, though few of them could be described as modernist, they shared with modernist writers a will to innovate. This book explores how Rationalist ideas were adapted and transformed by these experiments, focusing in particular on the modifications required to accommodate the strong mode of unbelief associated with British secularism to the notional mode of belief usually solicited by fiction. Whereas modernism is often understood as the literature for a secular age, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture looks elsewhere to find a literature that draws more directly on secularism for its aesthetics and its ethics.

The Salt Companion to Mina Loy comprises ten essays by leading scholars and writers on the work of modernist poet Mina Loy. Loy (1882-1966) formed part of the new generation of poets who revolutionised writing in the early twentieth century. She had personal and artistic links to Italian Futurism and Parisian Surrealism, as well as to individuals such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. Working with reference to, but also often against the ideas of these fellow writers, her experimental, witty and inconoclastic poems were both distinctive and arresting. Since the republication of her poems in 1996-7, Loy has gained in stature and importance both in the UK and the US: her writing is now seen as central to literary innovations in the 1910s and 1920s, and she is often a set author on undergraduate and MA courses. Apart from the collection of essays Mina Loy: Woman and Poet published twelve years ago, there is currently no single book on Loy's work in print. The Companion will be an invaluable new resource for students and readers of modernism. It provides new perspectives and cutting-edge research on Loy's work and is distinctive in its consideration of her prosodic and linguistic experiments alongside a discussion of the literary and historical contexts in which she worked. The contributors include influential and emerging experts in modernist studies. They are Peter Nicholls, Tim Armstrong, Geoff Gilbert, David Ayers, Andrew Robertson, John Wilkinson, Suzanne Hobson, Rachel Potter, Alan Marshall, Rowan Harris and Sandeep Parmar.