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《原版文学核心概念丛书:现代主义文学的核心概念》:
‘It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how your mind is supersaturated with the religioiwhich you say you disbelieve.The line from James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ma(1916) speaks not only to StepheDedaluss situation, and to Joyces own, but also to a generatioborinto religioand raised iaage of doubt. Ithe Victoriaera, Christiabelief was most famously shakeby Charles Darwins theory of evolutiothrough natural selection, detailed iThe Origiof the Species (1859) and The Descent of Ma(1871). The more literal, historical sort of Christianity was further undermined by textual scholarship othe Bible itself, which revealed its gradual productioby numerous authors over aextended period of time. The new field of comparative religiowas also widely perceived as a threat to Christianity. I1889, the anthropologist James Frazer wrote to his publisher describing the first editioof the GoldeBough (1890-1915), a book that would have a profound effect omodernist literature, and acknowledging one of its possible side effects. He wrote: ‘The resemblance of savage customs and ideas to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity is striking.But I make no reference to this parallelism, leaving my readers to draw their owconclusions, one way or the other. Theiaddition,there was Nietzsches sustained attack oChristianity ithe last decades of the century. This was neatly summed up ithe bold and quotable declaratioGod is dead, which first appears iThe Gay Saence (1882). The fact that the phrase was usually takeout of context is overshadowed by the substantial currency it gained with the general public.Givethe rise of secularism iBritaiand the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the extent to which religious themes and imagery still appear imodernist literature and art may be surprising. However, if the language and iconography of religiowere still used, the treatment and functioof religioimodernism changed dramatically. Religious belief, like most other areas of thought at the time, was perceived to be ia state of crisis. The directions modernist writers took iresponding to this crisis varied, but they generally fell into three categories: embracing secularism, usually itandem with challenging or attacking religious institutions; exploring spiritual alternatives to Christianity, including pantheism, the occult, and Easterreligion;and calling for the returto some sort of Christiatradition. The secularists were led by James Joyce, whose wife Nora refused last rites ohis behalf at his deathbed, and Virginia Woolf, along with most of Bloomsbury. The occultists included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the influential New Age editor A. R. Orage, although Joyce and D. H. Lawrence also employed the occult traditioidifferent ways. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Students of the GoldeDawand the Theosophical Society, both led by Madame Blavatsky, the key figure of the occult fad of the 1890s. His dedicatioto the occult lasted throughout his life, and was reflected ithe automatic writing experiments with his wife, Georgie Hyde Lees, and ithe system outlined iA Visio(1925).
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