High Modernism and the ‘Allegory of Theologians’

Abstract

The underlying premise of this chapter is that, to revive religious experience in an age of radical scepticism and disenchantment, certain high modernists turn to a medieval form of allegory as a model—more precisely, to the form of allegory employed by Dante in writing the Commedia. Three of the four modernist writers examined—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens—were deeply influenced by Dante, and the fourth, Virginia Woolf, provides an instructive case of a more secular writer whose mode of writing arrives at similar ends using similar means. Dante recognized two forms of allegory, the allegory of the theologians and the allegory of the poets, and the modernists in this study, learning from Dante, write a modernist version of the allegory of the theologians. To meet the needs of modernity, they retrieve a medieval model and ‘make it new’.