The dark dove : the sacred and secular in modern literature / Eugene Webb.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Webb, Eugene, 1938-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Holy, The, in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 280 pages)

Edition:

First paperback edition.

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [1975]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In a subtle exposition of the tension between sacred and secular themes in twentieth-century literature, Eugene Webb analyzes works by Yeats, Mann, Rilke, Stevens, Beckett, Joyce, Nietzsche, Eliot, Auden, and Ibsen. He demonstrates the connection between modern literature and religious tradition, and shows how conceptions of the sacred and its relation to the secular have been transformed in modern literary imagery. Webb considers the writers he discusses to be the true explorers of their generation, who have had to find a new symbolic language in which to understand and express their "idea of the holy." Because the sacred consists of "additude" and "experience" as well as "concept, " Webb maintains that it receives its most direct and adequate expression in works of imaginative literature, where imagery can combine the intellectual and emotional elements of the sacred and communicate them to the reader.

Contents:

Cover; Preface; Acknowledgments; Contents; I. The Paradox of the Sacred; II. The Tradition of the Sacred in the West; III. The Ambiguities of Secularization: Modern Transformations of the Kingdom in Nietzsche, Ibsen, Beckett, and Stevens; IV. The One and the Many: The Ambiguous Challenge of Being in the Poetry of Yeats and Rilke; V. A Darkness Shining in Brightness: James Joyce and the Obscure Soul of the World; VI. The Perilous Journey to Wholeness in Thomas Mann; VII. The Way Up and the Way Down: The Redemption of Time in T. S. Eliot's ""Ash Wednesday"" and Four Quartets; VIII. W. H. Auden: The Ambiguity of the SacredIX. Conclusion; Bibliography; Index

Notes:

Includes bibliography (p. 271-276) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780295805252

0295805250

OCLC:

931998322