Palgrave Studies in Global Literatures and Religions – serie

This collection addresses the gap in American critical history regarding the role of spiritual discourse in literary modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. No book-length research has yet been published about spirituality and American Literary Modernism, with the exception of a few books on individual authors. The majority of the primary and critical material this book examines has been either rarely or incompletely considered from this angle. The volume highlights those American writers and texts who insisted on the spiritual relevance of literature, despite the growing secularity of literary modernism, bringing together a range of scholars to inspire both professors and students of American literature to look again and reconsider the spiritual discourse represented in the literature between the World Wars.

This volume provides an analysis of the constitution of the idea of furor poeticus (poetic frenzy), the conception of the poet as an individual inspired and possessed by a kind of divine madness. This idea, deeply rooted in the Platonic tradition, was conceptualized in the Renaissance by Marsilio Ficino and his followers, who spread it throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. The first part of the book offers a comparative approach to the theory of furor poeticus in little-studied Italian humanists such as Francesco Zorzi and Alessandro Farra, who combined Neoplatonism with other popular currents of the time such as Orphism or the Christian Kabbalah. The second part of the volume aims to show that there is no abrupt break between Renaissance and Romantic poetics, as is sometimes claimed, and reveals new connections between different authors of these periods. This collection thus attempts to fill the gaps in the modern Platonic tradition by comparing different cultural spheres during the sixteenth-century Renaissance and then tracing its afterlife in modern literature and poetics through some representative case studies. For these reasons, the volume is aimed primarily at scholars and researchers interested in literary theory and the relationships between religious and poetic concepts in the modern period. The target audience will find in this volume a new approach to the theological and metaphysical foundations of one of the most influential poetological concepts of modern literary culture.