This 2000 book is a case study in the ongoing struggle of Christianity to define its relationship to modernity, examining representative Roman Catholic Modernists and anti-Modernists. It sketches the nineteenth-century background of the Modernist crisis, identifying the problems that the church was facing at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Catholic Modernists, English Nationalists examines how the Catholic conversions of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot (an Anglo-Catholic), Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene influenced and were influenced by literary modernism in England. These English modernists owe their Catholic conversions to a desire for a comprehensive spiritual answer to the social and psychological challenges of modernity. Because an impulse toward transcendent ideologies and a persistent nostalgia were central components of conservative strains of literary modernism in England, these converts were led toward Catholicism in part because of their practice of modernist aesthetics and its correlative ideological positions. Therefore, this book offers a nuanced trajectory of the modernist movement by suggesting that conservative strains of modernism developed directly because of the early modernists' emphasis on reviving certain fragments of literary tradition and due to the inherent nostalgia in much of their work.

Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

In this expanded and annotated version of his Lectures Dr Vidler shows that the modernists differed much from one another both in temperament and in ideas.

Catholic antimodern, 1920-1929 -- Anti-communism and paternal Catholicism, 1929-1944 -- Anti-fascism and fraternal Catholicism, 1929-1944 -- Rebuilding Christian Europe, 1944-1950 -- Christian democracy and Catholic innovation in the long 1950s -- The return of heresy in the global 1960s

Through a study of the participants, Marvin O'Connell traces the emergence of Modernism and the controversies related to it, offers a careful examination of the movement's multiple causes and ramifications, and places the events within the political, social, and intellectual context of the time.