Pinkerton shows how writers from the mainstream and the margins of the modernist movement attacked religion because they took it so seriously. an important contribution to rethinking the engagement of modernist writers with religion, and makes a persuasive case for the importance of blasphemy as a category of study in its own right.' -Imogen Woodberry, Los Angeles Review of Books 'Steve Pinkerton's Blasphemous Modernism is an important study of modernist writers' continuing engagement with religion in the early twentieth century-an era that is sometimes anachronistically treated as totally secularized. One of the greatest accomplishments of Blasphemous Modernism is that it forces us to return to the scene of some of modernism's greatest crimes against God and ask, not for the first time, if any crime were actually committed.' -Martin Lockerd, Modernism/Modernity 'Pinkerton's study is textually focused and compiles a lively and readable collection of examples of blasphemy. He has also opened the door for consideration of the nature and function of blasphemy in the work of authors who do sometimes validate the truth claims of religion - figures such as Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, and Marilynne Robinson.

Most compellingly, Pinkerton points to the ways that 'blasphemy is a barometer and a mechanism of power, a discourse governed by the powerful but also occasionally usurped by the marginalized in politically significant ways'' - The Year's Work in English Studies 'The author has done something undeniably important in explicating the blasphemous play of several important modernist artists. 'In its explorations of religion and blasphemy, Steve Pinkerton's Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh interrogates and challenges common understandings of the period as uninterested in religion's primacy: it 'attends to the complex relationship in modernist texts between words, the Word, and the flesh'.

Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural and ideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, ademonstration of how modernism persists in postwar anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercivedogmas-including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies.

Eliot's verdict that the forces ofsecularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ('a world in which blasphemy is impossible') their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. United by a shared commitment to 'the word made flesh,' writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and DjunaBarnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy-the rhetoric of religious offense-and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. Scholars have long described modernism as 'heretical' or 'iconoclastic' in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum.

Blasphemous modernism