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From 1890 to 1945, Europe was shaken by political, social, and cultural revolutions brought about by the crisis of modernity. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud stoked the yearnings of a convulsed era, devastated by the First World War. It was a time when all kinds of alternative and radical models of modernity were erected in pursuit of a new world: from the exasperation of communist and fascist totalitarianism to the frenzy of the artistic avant-gardes and biopolitics.
Hungry for transcendence and tormented by hope, this passionate age also gave rise in Europe to a Catholic revival in literature. Writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene in England; Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, and Georges Bernanos in France; and Ramiro de Maeztu and José Bergamín in Spain found that Catholicism was the key to coping with the enigmas and paradoxes of modern man. At the same time, by injecting the political and artistic principles of modernity into the Christian tradition, they transformed a reactionary Catholicism into the paradigm of ultramodernity.
This book explores the intellectual history of a European cultural phenomenon that has thus far been left out of most works of criticism, despite its magnitude. Moreover, it does so through vibrant prose that makes this work of research read like a novel.
List of contents
Acknowledgements - Introduction -Fin-de-Siècle Paris and the First Conversions - Claudel and the Constellation of the Nouvelle Revue Française - Gide and the Struggle Around the Nouvelle Revue Française - The Maritain Constellation - Maritain Among the Avant-Garde - French Catholicism Faced With the Condemnation of Action Française - Newman and the Oxford Movement - "Liquid Protestantism" and the Conversions of Robert Hugh Benson and Ronald Knox - The Chesterton Constellation - Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and the Holiness of the Anti-Hero - Catholicism, Liberalism, and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of the 19th Century - The Agonizing Christianity of Unamuno and the Lively Catholicism of Joan Maragall - Antonio Marichalar, Jose Bergamin, and the Refreshing Catholicism of Cruz y Raya - Ramiro de Maeztu: Witness to the Political and Spiritual Crisis of Modernity - The Fascist Temptations of Rafael Sanchez Mazas and Ernesto Gimenez Caballero - Conclusion - Index.
About the author
Enrique Sánchez-Costa has a PhD in humanities from Pompeu Fabra University, where he obtained the Extraordinary Award in 2012. He is Director of the Graduate Program in Spanish Studies: Linguistics and Literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (Dominican Republic).
