Table Of ContentAngels of Modernism
Also by Suzanne Hobson
THE SALT COMPANION TO MINA LOY (co-editor with Rachel Potter)
Angels of Modernism
Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910–1960
Suzanne Hobson
Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature
Queen Mary, University of London
© Suzanne Hobson 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-27539-3
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First published 2011 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-32474-3 ISBN 978-0-230-34964-3 (eBook)
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hobson, Suzanne.
Angels of modernism : religion, culture, aesthetics 1910–1960 /
Suzanne Hobson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Angels. 2. Angels in popular culture. 3. Angels in art. 4. Angels in
literature. I. Title.
BL477.H63 2011
202’.15—dc23 2011030611
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
Dedicated to my parents, Kathleen and Terry
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology 1
1 ‘On the Side of the Angels’: Historical Angels and
Angels of History 34
2 ‘The Angel Club’: The Angel versus the Ubermensch 72
3 ‘Angels on All Fours’: The Third Sex and Angels with
‘A Difference’ 112
4 ‘The Necessary Angel of Earth’: World War II and the
Utopian Imagination 141
Notes 182
Bibliography 208
Index 223
vii
List of Illustrations
2.1 Mammon, 1885 (oil on canvas) by George Frederic Watts
(1817–1904) © Trustees of the Watts Gallery, Compton,
Surrey UK/The Bridgeman Art Library. By permission
of The Bridgeman Art Library. 91
2.2 ‘To Overmen’, The New Freewoman, 1 (1 September 1913),
p. 120; and ‘To Foreign Despots’, The New Freewoman,
1 (15 August 1913), p. 98. By permission of Senate House
Library, University of London. 92
2.3 The Last Judgement, altarpiece from Santa Maria degli
Angioli, c.1431 (oil on panel) by Fra (Guido di Pietro)
Angelico (c.1387–1455). Museo di San Marco dell’Angelico,
Florence, Italy/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library.
By permission of the Bridgeman Art Library. 101
viii
Acknowledgements
The idea of writing about the puzzle of modernist angels first occurred
to me as a postgraduate student on the MA in Gender, Literature and
Modernity at the University of Warwick. I owe a huge amount to the
people who saw potential in this idea and guided me in the process of
turning it into a research project: initially Emma Francis at Warwick
and then Rachel Potter and Morag Shiach at Queen Mary, University
of London. They were and are wonderful models as researchers and
teachers and I continue to benefit from their expertise and support.
Others who offered much-appreciated advice and constructive criticism
along the way include Michèle Barrett, Cora Kaplan, Jacqueline Rose,
Laura Marcus and Steven Connor. In recent years, my thinking about
modernism has been refined and tested by a lively community of aca-
demics and students working on this topic in London and beyond. I am
grateful to the Modernism Research Seminar at the Institute of English
Studies, University of London for creating and maintaining a space in
which to debate new research and to the audiences at Modernist Studies
Association conferences in 2005, 2007 and 2009 for their helpful com-
ments on work in progress. Céline Magot has discussed this project with
me from the beginning and I would like to thank Céline and the organ-
izers of the Women, Conflict and Power conference at the University of
Toulouse II–Le Mirail for inviting me to speak on angels of war. I owe
a great deal to colleagues and postgraduates past and present in the
English Department at Queen Mary, especially Julia Boffey, Santanu
Das, Markman Ellis, Rachael Gilmour, Sam Halliday, Peter Howarth,
Annie Janowitz, Chris Reid, Bill Schwarz and Adam Trexler. Paula
Kennedy and Ben Doyle at Palgrave Macmillan have been unfailingly
professional and supportive and I am grateful to Palgrave Macmillan’s
anonymous reader for detailed and exacting comments on drafts of
the book. Finally, I would like to offer particular thanks to my friends
Rowan Boyson, Molly Macdonald and Steve Goldup who lent their own
skills as academics and readers to help me complete this book. They are
very much on the side of the angels.
An earlier version of the Introduction appeared in Literature Compass,
4:2 (2007), 494–507; sections of Chapter 2 appeared in Literature
and Theology, 22:1 (2008), 48–63; and a much shorter version of
Chapter 4 appeared in Miranda, 2 (2010), ‘Voicing Conflict: Women and
ix
