Marginality Media and Mutations of Religious

Authority in the History of Christianity 1st Edition

J.N. Bremmer (Editor) - PDF Download (2025)

https://ebookultra.com/download/marginality-media-and-mutations-
of-religious-authority-in-the-history-of-christianity-1st-
edition-j-n-bremmer-editor/

Visit ebookultra.com today to download the complete set of

ebooks or textbooks
Here are some recommended products for you. Click the link to
download, or explore more at ebookultra.com

Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious

Authority 1st Edition Heidi A. Campbell

https://ebookultra.com/download/digital-creatives-and-the-rethinking-
of-religious-authority-1st-edition-heidi-a-campbell/

Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory Routledge Research in

Cultural and Media Studies Volume 29 1st Edition Brett
Ashley Kaplan
https://ebookultra.com/download/landscapes-of-holocaust-postmemory-
routledge-research-in-cultural-and-media-studies-volume-29-1st-
edition-brett-ashley-kaplan/

Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of

Islam 1st Edition Wendy Mayer

https://ebookultra.com/download/religious-conflict-from-early-
christianity-to-the-rise-of-islam-1st-edition-wendy-mayer/

A New History of Christianity in China Blackwell Guides to

Global Christianity 1st Edition Daniel H. Bays

https://ebookultra.com/download/a-new-history-of-christianity-in-
china-blackwell-guides-to-global-christianity-1st-edition-daniel-h-
bays/
Religious Knowledge Authority and Charisma Islamic and
Jewish Perspectives 1st Edition Daphna Ephrat

https://ebookultra.com/download/religious-knowledge-authority-and-
charisma-islamic-and-jewish-perspectives-1st-edition-daphna-ephrat/

The Book of Mutations 2nd Edition R. Leo Gillis

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-book-of-mutations-2nd-edition-r-
leo-gillis/

The Origin of Heresy A History of Discourse in Second

Temple Judaism and Early Christianity 1st Edition Robert
M. Royalty
https://ebookultra.com/download/the-origin-of-heresy-a-history-of-
discourse-in-second-temple-judaism-and-early-christianity-1st-edition-
robert-m-royalty/

The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity 1st Edition

Michael J. Lacey

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-crisis-of-authority-in-catholic-
modernity-1st-edition-michael-j-lacey/

The Problem of Pleasure Sport Recreation and the Crisis of

Victorian Religion Studies in Modern British Religious
History vol 22 1st Edition Dominic Erdozain
https://ebookultra.com/download/the-problem-of-pleasure-sport-
recreation-and-the-crisis-of-victorian-religion-studies-in-modern-
british-religious-history-vol-22-1st-edition-dominic-erdozain/
Marginality Media and Mutations of Religious Authority
in the History of Christianity 1st Edition J.N. Bremmer
(Editor) Digital Instant Download
Author(s): J.N. Bremmer (editor)
ISBN(s): 9789042936744, 9042936746
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.99 MB
Year: 2019
Language: english
 Studies in the History and Anthropology of Religion 6

Marginality, Media, and Mutations

of Religious Authority
in the History of Christianity

Laura Feldt and Jan N. Bremmer (Eds)

PE E T E R S
MARGINALITY, MEDIA, AND MUTATIONS
OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY
IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY
ST U D I E S I N T H E H I ST O RY A N D A N T H R O P O L O G Y O F R E L IG IO N

Editors: Jan N. Bremmer and Laura Feldt

In recent years, especially after the tragic events of 9/11, religion has increas-
ingly drawn the attention of scholars. Whereas, traditionally, religion was
studied by historians, anthropologists and students of the main religious
traditions, today religion can be seen as a major factor on the contemporary
political stage and is omnipresent in the media. Yet modern developments
can rarely be well understood without proper anthropological and historical
analyses. That is why we are pleased to announce a new series, Studies in the
History and Anthropology of Religion. The editors welcome contributions on
specific aspects of religion from a historical and/or anthropological perspec-
tive, be it proceedings of conferences or monographs.

1. The Strange World of Human Sacrifice, J.N. Bremmer (ed.), Leuven, 2007

2. The Celtic Evil Eye and Related Mythological Motifs in Medieval Ireland,
J. Borsje, Leuven, 2012

3. Dreams as Divine Communication in Christianity: From Hermas to Aquinas,

B.J. Koet (ed.), Leuven, 2012

4. Writing Myth: Mythography in the Ancient World, S.M. Trzaskoma and

R.S. Smith (eds), Leuven, 2013

5 Priests and Prophets among Pagans, Jews and Christians, B. Dignas, R. Parker
and G.G. Stroumsa (eds), Leuven, 2013
Marginality, Media, and Mutations
of Religious Authority
in the History of Christianity

edited by

Laura Feldt and Jan N. Bremmer

PEETERS
LEUVEN  PARIS  BRISTOL, CT
2019
Cover illustration:
“Temptation of Saint Anthony”, by Mathias Grünewald (Isenheim Altarpiece).
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

© 2019, Peeters – Bondgenotenlaan 153 – B-3000 Leuven – Belgium

ISBN 978-90-429-3674-4
eISBN 978-90-429-3886-1
D/2019/0602/16

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
 CONTENTS

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Notes on the Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

I L. Feldt, Marginality, Media, and Mutations of Religious

Authority in the History of Christianity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The Power of Religious Marginality: Monastic Media Cultures

II J.N. Bremmer, Athanasius’ Life of Antony: Marginality, Spatiality

and Mediality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
III D. Frankfurter, Charismatic Textuality and the Mediation of
Christianity in Late Antique Egypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
IV L. Feldt, Letters from the Wilderness – Marginality, Literarity,
and Religious Authority Changes in Late Antique Gaul . . . . . . . 69

Marginality as Strategy and Tactics: Adapting Media

V C. Høgel, Symeon the New Theologian, Mystical Poetry, and

the Response to the Textualisation of Sainthood in Byzantium . 97
VI B. van der Lans, The Written Media of Imperial Government
and a Martyr’s Career: Justin Martyr’s 1 Apology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
VII D. Johannsen, Vis-Knut: Marginality in Folklore and Folk
Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Marginalising Others: Social Marginality and Narrative Networks

VIII M. Rubin, Authority, Genre and Resistance: Child Murder in

Medieval Norwich, and its Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
IX L.N. Kallestrup, Wrath and Fear. Lutheranism and the Margin-
alisation of Witches in Early Modern Denmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
VI contents

Performing Marginality: Contemporary Religious Belonging and Media

Cultures

X I.S. Gilhus, Mutations of Religious Authority in Contemporary

Norway – Marginality and Mediatization in the Case of the
Man from Snåsa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
XI A.K. Trolle, Catholic Migrant, Unknown Visionary . . . . . . . . . 209
XII S. Schüler, Prayers and Stories as Media and Materiality:
Changing Sources of Authority in the Emerging Church Move-
ment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Index of names and subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
 PREFACE

This volume springs from an international seminar held at the University

of Southern Denmark, Odense, in late August 2016. I wish to thank The
Carlsberg Foundation for generously funding the seminar, as well as the par-
ticipants for their stimulating contributions to thinking through the theme of
marginality, media, and mutations of religious authority with me. I also wish
to thank the Department of History for hosting and funding the research
programme Authority, Materiality, and Media from which some of these
ideas grew, and the good colleagues who participated in the work of the
research programme. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank Professor
Jan N. Bremmer for so generously applying his excellent editorial eye to the
final form of this set of articles.

Odense, February 2018 Laura Feldt

 NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Jan N. Bremmer is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University

of Groningen. More recently, he published The Rise of Christianity through
the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark (2010); Initiation into the
Mysteries of the Ancient World (2014) and Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in
Early Christianity: Collected Essays I (2017). He co-edited Perpetua’s Passions
(2012); The Materiality of Magic (2015); The Ascension of Isaiah (2016);
Thecla: Paul’s Disciple and Saint in the East and West (2016) and Figures of
Ezra (2018).

Laura Feldt is Associate Professor of the Study of Religions with the Depart-
ment of History, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, head of the
cross-disciplinary research programme Authority, Materiality and Media,
and managing editor of Numen – International Review of the History of
Religions (Brill) with G. D. Alles. She is the author of The Fantastic in
Religious Narrative from Exodus to Elisha (2012), editor of Wilderness in
Mythology and Religion – Approaching Religious Spatialities, Cosmologies,
and Ideas of Wild Nature (2012) and Reframing Authority – The Role of
Media and Materiality (2018) with C. Høgel.

David Frankfurter is Professor of Religion and Aurelio Professor of the

Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University and a specialist in Roman
and Late Antique Egypt, popular religion, magic, ancient apocalypticism,
demonology and exorcism, and the dynamics of Christianization. His books
include Elijah in Upper Egypt (1993), Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation
and Resistance (1998), Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and
Satanic Abuse in History (2006), Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local
Worlds in Late Antiquity (2017), and the edited volume Pilgrimage and Holy
Space in Late Antique Egypt (1998). His articles have appeared in Journal
of Early Christian Studies, Numen, Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte, Journal of
the History of Sexuality, and many others.

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus is Professor of the Study of Religion at the University

of Bergen, Norway. She works in the areas of religion in late antiquity and
X notes on the contributors

new religious movements. Her publications include Laughing Gods, Weeping

Virgins (1997), Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals
in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (2006), New Age Spirituality:
Rethinking Religion, edited with Steven J. Sutcliffe (2013), and New Age in
Norway, edited with Siv Ellen Kraft and James R. Lewis (2017).

Christian Høgel is Professor (wso) of Byzantine Literature and co-director

of the Centre for Medieval Literature at the Department of History, Univer-
sity of Southern Denmark, Odense (www.sdu.dk/cml). He has published on
Byzantine hagiography (Symeon Metaphrastes. Rewriting and Canonization,
2002), Arabic-Greek translation (especially the early Greek translation of
the Qur’an), and on the Ciceronian concept of humanitas (The Human and
the Humane, 2015).

Dirk Johannsen is Associate Professor of Cultural History at the Department

of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS), University of Oslo. His
research focuses on narrative cultures, popular religion in the nineteenth
century, cognitive approaches, and trolls. He is the author of Das Numinose
als kulturwissenschaftliche Kategorie (2008), the editor of a volume on narra-
tological approaches to religion, Konstruktionsgeschichten (2013) with Gabriela
Brahier, and a volume on the Norwegian Folklore Archives ‘En vild ende-
vending av al virkelighet’ – Norsk Folkeminnesamling i hundre år (2014) with
Line Esborg.

Birgit van der Lans was affiliated with the Department of Archaeology,
History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway, on
a Niels Stensen Fellowship with her project Christian Correspondence and
Diplomatic Culture in the Early Roman Empire. Her dissertation at the Uni-
versity of Groningen discusses Jewishness and Christian Identity in Claudian-
Neronian Rome: Impacts of State Interventions. She has published articles
on persecution, martyrdom, expulsion, and the literary representation of
these events in Jewish and Christian sources. She currently works for the
Council for Religious and Life Stance Communities in Bergen, Norway.

Louise Nyholm Kallestrup is Associate Professor, the Department of

History, and director of Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the
University of Southern Denmark. She has authored and co-edited a number
of publications on early modern Italy and Denmark. Among her recent
publications are Agents of Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy and Denmark
(2015), ‘“When Hell became too Small”. Constructing Witchcraft in Post-
Reformation Denmark’ in Cultural Histories of Denmark 1500-2000 (2017)
 notes on the contributors XI

co-edited with Tyge Krogh & Claus Bundgaard Christensen; ‘Kind in words
and deeds, but false in their hearts: Fear of evil conspiracy in late sixteenth-
century Denmark’ in Cultures of Witchcraft and Magic, J. Barry et al (eds.:
2017; and ‘The Infected and the Guilty: On Heresy and Witchcraft in Post-
Reformation Denmark’ and ‘Approaches to heresy, witchcraft and magic’,
(with Raisa Toivo), in Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe: Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft, co-edited with Raisa Toivo (2017).

Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at the School
of History, Queen Mary University of London. She is a Fellow of the Royal
Historical Society and Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of
America. She is the author of several books, among them Corpus Christi:
the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (1991), Gentile Tales; the Narrative
Assault on Late Medieval Jews (1999), Mother of God. A History of the Virgin
Mary (2009), and most recently she has translated and edited Thomas of
Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich (2014) for Penguin
Classics.

Sebastian Schüler is Assistant Professor for the Study of Religions at Leipzig

University, Germany. He has published a number of articles dealing with
contemporary Evangelical movements in the USA and Europe. His research
covers different theoretical areas such as religious cognition and evolution,
religion and the body, the aesthetics of religion, and the sociology of religious
movements and transformations. He is the author of Religion, Kognition,
Evolution: Eine religionswissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit der Cogni-
tive Science of Religion (2012), editor of Religion and Madness around 1900:
Between Pathology and Self-Empowerment (2017) with Lutz Greisiger and
Alexander van der Haven.

Astrid Krabbe Trolle is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Section,

Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copen-
hagen. Her PhD project focuses on Christian Filipino migrants with a special
emphasis on how generation and social class influence moral values in the
diasporic community. She has authored the articles ‘Migrantkirker. Fra
grænseflade til kerne i den danske religionsmodel’ (Migrant Churches. From
Periphery to Centre in the Danish Model of Religion) (2015), ‘Det nationale
og det nye. Filippinske katolske og pinsekirkelige menigheder i Danmark’
(The National and the Novelty. Filipino Catholic and Pentecostal Congrega-
tions in Denmark) (2016), and edited a special issue of Religionsvidenskabe-
ligt Tidsskrift (Journal for the Science of Religion) on the Danish model of
religion (2015) with Margit Warburg.
 I. MARGINALITY, MEDIA, AND MUTATIONS
OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY
IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

Laura Feldt

Introduction

Marginal figures, from heretics, ascetics, and mystics, to saints, visionar-

ies, and witches have played key roles in decisive mutations of religious
authority in the history of different forms of Christianity. Yet, marginality
has often been understood primarily in terms of social exclusion, othering,
and demonization, and/or as a matter of ideological and cognitive differ-
ence. This perspective on marginality does not explain its role in trans-
formations of religious authority, where marginal positions may be used
tactically or changed to positions of empowered agency and alternative
authority by means of a creative use of media, nor does it throw light on the
use of the power of the marginal in religious discourses of marginality
where marginality is used to enhance or change status. Religious ideas
of marginality have often been used positively in performances of margin-
ality through religious technologies of the self, in spatial instantiations as
mythologies of the wilderness, and for constructing special objects that
give the sense of ‘a presence of something “beyond”’.1
The goal of this volume is to offer new analyses and understandings of
marginality by using media perspectives to discuss marginality as a social
and religious phenomenon. The volume presents case studies of a wide range
of uses of marginality discourses in different historical contexts, throwing
light on the religious power of the marginal, on strategic and tactical uses of
marginality, on marginality as othering, and on performances of marginal-
ity. The central aim is to show how a focus on media and mediality is crucial

1 B. Meyer, ‘Mediation and the Genesis of Presence’ (reprint of inaugural lecture).

Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5 (2014) 205-54 (quote on p. 214). Birgit Meyer
has been at the forefront of the inspirational media and religion research trend.
2 laura feldt

for understanding the role of marginality – religious as well as social – in

authority changes in the history of Christianity.
The chapters of this volume contribute to an inter-disciplinary conversa-
tion on religion and media from the perspectives of historians of religion
and historians. The articles discuss a wide range of media, from space,
technologies of the self and literary forms, to objects, visual culture and
contemporary mass and social media. While our aim is to throw new light
on how the concept of marginality encompasses not only social marginal-
ity, but also religious marginality, and on how marginality can be used
strategically and tactically to change forms of authority, we are especially
interested in the role of media in such processes.
The currently blossoming field of ‘religion and media’ has primarily
focused on new media in the contemporary era, although this situation is
slowly changing.2 Media-focused analyses of case studies from the history
of Christianity have mainly concentrated on the contemporary era, and on
non-Western forms of Christianity. The field seems to want historical per-
spectives and comparative, historical case studies that also include Western
forms of Christianity. We attempt to remedy the lack of research specifi-
cally on marginality and the role of media in transformations of religious
authority in the diverse and multi-faceted history of different forms of
Christianity.
Inspired by recent work in the field of religion and media, especially that
of Birgit Meyer and David Morgan,3 the volume works from the assumption
that, even if religion has often been studied as a question of ideas and rep-
resentations, specific media, their use, materiality, appraisal, and appeal, are
not something added to religion, but fundamentally inextricable from how
religion functions. All religions use media of many different kinds in order
to ensure their own transmission across generations, in order to stay in
the existential game, as it were, – from literature to rituals, ascetic training
programmes, architecture, religious paraphernalia such as rosaries and
figurines, and to the internet and social media.4 The goal is to use the media

2 P. Horsfield, From Jesus to the Internet. A History of Christianity and Media (London,

2015); K. Lundby (ed.), Religion Across Media. From Early Antiquity to Late Modernity
(New York, 2013).
3 B. Meyer (ed.) Aesthetic Formations. Media, Religion and the Senses (New York, 2009);

B. Meyer, ‘Mediation and Immediacy. Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the
Question of the Medium’, Social Anthropology 19/1 (2011) 23-39; D. Morgan, The Embodied
Eye. Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Oakland, 2012).
4 Horsfield, From Jesus; Lundby, Religion Across Media; Meyer, ‘Mediation and Immedi-

acy’; Morgan, The Embodied Eye; S. Hjarvard, and M. Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and
Religion: Nordic Perspectives (Gothenburg, 2012).
 marginality, media, and mutations 3

and materiality-oriented change of focus in the study of religions to throw

new light on the role of marginality in the history of Christianity. With this
volume, we thus advance the understanding of marginality by analysing the
use of media, by or in relation to marginal figures, as well as the role of
religious discourses on marginality, in transformations of religious author-
ity in the history of Christianity. Before I present the contributions of the
book, let me introduce the key terms.

Marginality and Mutations of Religious Authority

In sociological research on marginality, the focus has often been on a

dichotomous self/othering or centre/periphery model, and in social scien-
tific marginality research, the concept of social marginality is often used
to explain the complexities of exclusion.5 In cultural studies research,
monstrous, marginal and deviant persons or beings have been analysed as
figures of abjection and distancing, victims of othering, demonization and
social exclusion.6 While the empowering and fascinating aspects of mar-
ginality and the potentiality of marginality for effectuating change have
been noted,7 the functioning of these aspects of marginality has been
unfolded to a lesser extent. This book contributes precisely in this regard,
as it presents case studies that bring out forms of religious as well as social
marginality and analyse how marginality can be used tactically and crea-
tively to effect change.
We work from a distinction between social marginality, which is com-
monly involuntary and associated with discomfort and distress, and religious
marginality, which can be voluntary, actively sought out, and performed.
The marginal is often co-constitutive for religious authority, both in terms
of social marginality and in terms of religious discourses of marginality, in
as much as we understand marginality and authority as relational and con-
testable positions, which need to be researched as such. With this book,
we suggest that if we focus on how the relations between marginality and

5 J. von Braun and F. Gatzweiler (eds.), Marginality: addressing the nexus of poverty,

exclusion and ecology (Cham, 2014); R.J. Dunne, ‘Marginality: a conceptual extension’,
in R.M. Dennis (ed.), Marginality, Power, and Social Structure (Oxford, 2005) 11-28;
B.T. Cullen and M. Pretes, ‘The meaning of marginality: interpretations and perceptions in
social science’, The Social Science Journal 37/2 (2000) 215-29.
6 D. Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate. Rumours of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in

History (Princeton, 2006); S. Crook, ‘Minotaurs and Other Monsters’, Sociology 32 (1998)
523-40; J.J. Cohen, Monster Theory – Reading Culture (Minneapolis, 1996).
7 As, e.g., by J.J. Cohen, Monster Theory and J.J. Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Mon-

strosity in Medieval Britain (London, 2006).

4 laura feldt

religious authority are mediated, we can stimulate new understanding of the

role of marginality with regard to transformations of religious authority.
As formulated by Braun and Gatzweiler, the concept of social marginal-
ity is understood sociologically as ‘an involuntary position and condition of
an individual or group at the margins of social, political, economic, ecolog-
ical or biophysical systems, preventing them from access to resources,
assets, services, restraining freedom of choice, preventing the development
of capabilities, and eventually causing (extreme) poverty’.8 Braun and
Gatzweiler discuss how researchers generally agree that social marginality
is always perspectival, i.e., ‘relative to a particular point’.9 It is therefore
always important, in discussions of social marginality, to take into account
how the framing of social marginality can indeed vary (e.g., as either fixed
or mobile), and that marginality is multi-dimensional, because an actor can
be simultaneously integrated with one or more centres, while being under-
stood as marginal in relation to one or more other centres.10 Social margin-
ality research frequently focuses on the causes for exclusion, inequality,
social justice, spatial segregation, etc., and understands marginality as a
social construction for which social power is the key determining factor.11
In the social sciences, the concept of social marginality is often under-
stood to derive from Park’s 1928 essay ‘Migration and the Marginal Man’.
Park understood the marginal man as a figure appearing as a result of
migration, a cultural hybrid, who shared in more than one culture, who
mediated between cultures, as an intermediary agent.12 Park’s essay leads
us towards the concerns in focus in this volume, because we are interested
in how social marginality is observed and culturally embedded, in how
cultural views of social marginality may change over time, in the meanings
social marginality are ascribed in different eras or contexts, and in the
historically variable status of marginality. Park’s idea of the marginal man
as an intermediary agent leads us also to our next concept, namely religious
discourses of marginality, which are a subset of broader, cultural discourses
of marginality; i.e., religious discourses of marginality form a part of how
marginality is observed and verbalised in a society. We are interested the
meanings it is ascribed and how they vary in the history of Christianity.

8 Braun and Gatzweiler, Marginality.

9 Braun and Gatzweiler, Marginality, 30.
10 Dunne ‘Marginality’, 15.
11 Cullen and Pretes, ‘The Meaning of Marginality’.
12 R.E. Park, ‘Human Migration and the Marginal Man’, American Journal of Sociology

33 (1928) 881-91.
 marginality, media, and mutations 5

Turning briefly to etymology, the Latin term margō referred to a retain-

ing wall, a bank, an edging, a flange or rim, a border or an edge, or the
margin of a book (The Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v.), aspects which point
in interesting ways not only towards common understandings of the mar-
ginal, but also towards the uses of marginality, as that which is not at the
centre, but which frames and enables it, to a peripheral space of interaction
and exchange, an intermediate boundary space. Approaching the concept
of religious discourses of marginality, we must ask what it is that allows us
to place ascetics, saints, mystics, martyrs, and witches (etc.) in the same
category? What seems to characterise the marginal in religious discourses
is some form of deviation from a norm or a centre. The religiously marginal
is transgressive, liminal, and it has to do with boundaries, a departure from
a centre, but also with the periphery as a broader zone of exchange and
interaction, that may involve a transgression of the norms and boundaries
of the cultural centre, but with which the centre is in continual interaction
and with which it has multiple kinds of relations. Here too the perspectival
and relational qualities of marginality must be stressed.
Boundaries vary from culture to culture, and from one historical con-
text to the next, but a virtual norm or a virtual centre is always at stake,
according to which the marginal is a deviation, a transgression.13 Such
transgressions and departures may be used for religious articulations of
the intersections between this world and the other world in the religious
imaginary. Articulations of the intersections between the human everyday
world and the superhuman otherworld are of course historically and
cross-culturally variable, but they commonly involve intermediary agents
and marginal figures, such as angels, demons, wild men and saints, as well
as functionally similar spaces, actions, and objects. For these reasons,
social marginality and religious discourses of marginality often intersect.
As our case studies show, discourses of marginality are always perspectival
and must be contextualised historically, culturally, and socially.
In discourses of religious marginality, the boundary between the human
and the non-human, or this world and the other world, is continually in
focus. Discourses of religious marginality revolve around articulations
of the intersections between the everyday, human world and the non-
human, including the divine otherworld. Religious marginality can thus

13 H.R. Brittnacher, Ästhetik des Horrors (Frankfurt a.M., 1994), 183-87; L. Feldt, ‘Mon-

strøsitet som kulturel og religiøs diskurs’, Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift 42 (2003) 43-64;

A. Mittman, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’, in A.S. Mittman
(ed.), with P. J. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous
(Farnham, 2012) 1-16.
6 laura feldt

be distinguished from regular deities and fully superhuman, religious

cosmological domains like heaven or hell, because religious marginality
is precisely about ways of articulating, through media, the intersection
between worlds, about putting into words that which lies at the edges of the
human world, that which contributes to the delimitation of worlds in the
religious imaginary. Such intersections, or forms of religious marginality,
can be seen in the examples of the ascetic, the mystic, the witch, or the
saint, in natural-fantastic or artefactual-fantastic spaces like wildernesses,14
churches,15 haunted houses, or in the material charisma of relics, figurines,
and other special objects.16
Religious marginality discourses often involve hybrid bodies, which
belong to, or transgress, more than one category, liminal spaces, in which
impossible events can happen, or stories of fantastic actions done by
incredible persons. Religious marginality discourses may threaten cultural
categories and critique the existing cultural order, because the marginal,
on the one hand, embodies that which may dissolve existing categories,
and this may lead to demonization. On the other hand, the special person
or member of a category is defined precisely by his or her marked devia-
tion from the category, too, and therefore marginality can be used also
as a distinction. The marginal is, in cultural and historical understanding,
a matter of perspective and relations, and marginality is a discourse, which
can, on the one hand, be used to horrify, scare, delegitimise and demonise,
but on other it can also be used to distinguish, fascinate, and empower.
For this volume’s discussions of social and religious marginality, it is
further important to draw on sociological understandings of marginality
as a practice. These focus on the marginal figure not solely as a figure of
exclusion on the part of a centre of authority, but on marginality as per-
formed and mediated by ‘agents capable of functioning in a particular
social, political or religious environment in contradistinction to … hegem-
onic environments’.17 It is important because such understandings stress

14 L. Feldt (ed.), Wilderness in Mythology and Religion. Approaching Religious Spatiali-

ties, Cosmologies, and Ideas of Wild Nature (Berlin, 2012); L. Feldt, The Fantastic in Religious
Narrative from Exodus to Elisha (London, 2012).
15 D. Massey, ‘Politics and Space/Time’, in M. Keith and S. Pile (eds.), Place and the

Politics of Identity (London and New York, 1993) 3; T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place:
Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis, 1996).
16 C.W. Bynum, ‘The Sacrality of Things. An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the

Christian Middle Ages’, Irish Theological Quarterly 78 (2012) 3-18; C.W. Bynum, Christian
Materiality. An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2012).
17 R. Valantasis, The Making of the Self. Ancient and Modern Asceticism (Cambridge,

2008) 103-13 at 103; cf. M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège
de France 1981-1982, ed. F. Gros. Trsl. by G. Burchell (New York, 2005) 413-89.
 marginality, media, and mutations 7

not only the relations between social marginality and religious marginality
discourses, but also the performance of marginality and its tactical and
strategic uses.
While it is important to be aware of how social marginality and reli-
gious discourses of marginality may relate and intersect, this volume
maintains the usefulness of making this fundamental distinction. It stresses
how marginality discourses function through media performances and
the circulation of media-objects.18 Religious marginality is not the same
as social marginality, for forms of religious marginality may be socially
central at a general level, in the cult of particular religions (like saint
worship in medieval forms of Christianity), but still represent a kind of
religious marginality at a different level of analysis. Still, we are of course
aware of the many relations and intersections between the two. Religious
marginality is connected to the concept of liminality, as is social margin-
ality, and interestingly, this is where charisma, as a form of religious
authority,19 and marginality intersect, and where ideas from the media-
material turn can make a key difference.
With this book, we investigate some of the ways in which the marginal
can be co-constitutive for religious authority, and we suggest that both
positions must be understood as relational and contestable, and can be
researched as such. The book’s guiding assumption is that focusing on how
the relations between marginality and religious authority are mediated can
fuel new understanding of the role of marginality in transformations of
religious authority, of the relations between social and religious forms of
marginality, and of the voluntary, performed, fascinating and transforma-
tive potential of marginality.
As sociologist Frank Furedi has put it recently, authority has an elusive
quality.20 Authority differs from power, and it is often pointed out how
authority, properly understood, hovers between force, or the threat of

18 M. Serres, Le Parasite (Paris, 1980) 224-25, 302-05; L. Feldt, The Fantastic, 235-58;

J. Stolow, ‘Religion and/as Media’, Theory, Culture and Society 22 (2005) 119-45.
19 M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der Verstehenden Soziologie. Fünfte,

revidierte Auflage, besorgt von J. Winckelmann. Studienausgabe (Tübingen 1980 [1921]);

S. Breuer, Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie (Frankfurt and New York, 1991) 32-67; L. Feldt,
‘Authority, Space, and Literary Media – Eucherius’ Epistula de laude eremi and authority
changes in late antique Gaul’, Postscripts – The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary
Worlds 8/2 (published in Jan. 2018 / due to journal lapse counted as: 2012) 193-219.
20 F. Furedi, Authority. A Sociological Approach (Cambridge, 2013) vii. This section on

the concept of authority overlaps with my previously published discussion of authority in

L. Feldt, ‘Special issue introduction – Reframing Authority. The Role of Media and Materi-
ality’, Postscripts – the Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Contexts 8/2 (2018 / 2012)
185-92.
Other documents randomly have
different content
 The Silver Ship
Skipwith Cannéll

A silver ship with silken sail

Fled ghost-like over a silver sea,
Swift to an island leper pale
Where dead hands furled the silken sail.
Then to the island bore they me,
And left me, stricken, there to see
My silver ship with silken sail
Fade out across a silent sea.
 The Butterfly
Skipwith Cannéll

O ne day in the lean youth of Summer, a butterfly was born upon

the earth. To a brief day of beauty she was born, and to a long
night.
Timidly her purple wings unfolded in the kind warmth of the sun.
When they had grown strong, she began to flutter hither and thither,
from flower to flower, a wingéd dream flitting as perfumes called her,
from dream to dream.
At last, when the dark fingers of the night were clutching at the
fields, from the brief stillness of twilight arose a brief summer storm.
Only a few puffs of wind ruffled the grass, only a few growls of
thunder silenced the birds, only a few warm drops of rain pattered
among the trees. Then the storm passed and the sun shone over the
wet earth as a sweetheart shines through her tears with promise of
pardon.
But the warm wind had blown the butterfly against a twig, so that
her wings were broken; and the soft summer rain had crushed her
to the earth, so that she died. But there had been one passing,
whose dreams were in music, and he had felt her beauty in his own.
And he spun a web of harmony from the rainbow of his sorrow and
the skeins of her beauty, so that men who had lost their dreams
were snared in his net, and women whose hearts were buried wept
for the death of a butterfly....
 The Tidings
Skipwith Cannéll

O nce upon a time, in a certain secret city of the East, lived a

woman who was a sorceress. And she awaited tidings of great
joy or tidings of terrible sorrow.
All day long, from her housetop, she had peered across the
desert, seeking the messenger who did not come. At nightfall her
servants returned to her with rumors gathered in the market place.
With rumors of sorrow they returned and stood in a row before her
with averted faces.
When she had heard their fears, she thanked them, and going
down from the housetop, she sought a hidden chamber where she
could be alone and silent. When she had pondered for awhile, she
piled rare herbs in a brazier, and wet them with strange liquors, and
touched fire to them. The flames flickered and smoked, singing a
soft happy little song all to themselves. But she could read no
answer in the singing, and no meaning in the coils of smoke; and
she was very sad. At last, with a despairing gesture, she took certain
secret things from the chest whereof she alone had the key, and
those things she laid upon the fire and watched until they were
consumed.
As soon as the embers were cold and gray, she took from the
carven chest a vial of jade and a jade cup. From the vial she poured
out a pale green potion, and raising the cup in her hands, she drank
it to the end. Then she lay down upon the marble couch. In a little
while she slept.
A sweet, heavy vapor rose from the cup, filling the room with
perfume. The dregs glowed with dull evil light, for the potion had
been poison, and her sleep was death.
In the morning came a messenger, bearing tidings of great joy.
 Longing
George Burman Foster

I t was indeed a world-historical movement, that old reformation of

the Sixteenth century, snapping as it did the fetters of a Church
that arrogated to itself all power in heaven and on earth, and
defiantly asserting supremacy over the papacy. But the reformation
of our day is much more radical and universal. Ours ends what that
began, destroys what that established. The critical spirit of our time,
this nothing can withstand unless it is in a position to justify and
verify itself to the moral and rational judgment of mankind. In our
time of day, what is church, what is state, what are society and law
and sanctified custom—things that the old reformation partly
inherited, partly organized, and wholly bequeathed to us? At best,
tones for the musician’s use, clay in the hands of the potter, or stuff
for the sculptor’s shaping, materials all, ductile or refractory, to be
kneaded into forms for the habitation of man’s free spirit, man’s
soul, man’s life. This critical spirit of an all-inclusive reform of life, to
which everything belonging to life is subject, for which science works
and art as well, living and active in the heart of modern humanity in
countless problems, like the woman problem, the labor problem, like
national and international social problems, with all their subdivisions,
—this critical spirit gives our time a prophetic character. It summons
all progressive spirits to the great struggle against a common foe,
against all those forces which have banded together for a standstill
of life and have made a lucrative and social-climbing business out of
retrogression.
Can there be any doubt as to the stand we ought to take with
reference to these great movements? May we not greet them as a
new spring-time of humanity whose light and warmth shall vanquish
winter, and bring life, joy and peace into the land? “When the Day of
Passover was fully Come”—may we not see this day in these
movements, when a spirit of truth and soul and freedom shall brood
over men, and lead them to higher goals and greater tasks of
human being?
To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and
invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will
come, must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be
sure, the matter of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new
cultural and social forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt
these forces of life will carry the individual along with them, will
come upon him and coerce him when he does not so will, will not at
all even ask him what he wills, what he has to say to them, or how
he regards them. But on this very account, in surveying the great
whole of our life development we easily lose sense for what is
individual and special. Where classes and masses of men encounter
each other, where world-moving thought jolt and undermine
thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very
foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement,
there we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and
that the greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth
of these units.
Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew that man
is the significant thing in every new social culture—is beginning and
goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respecting man and his
personality into this social movement and seething, this is to do an
essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us
that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure
objectivity.
No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as
Friedrich Nietzsche. He is not the preacher of social, but of personal,
man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he yet
became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too,
wills a new culture, but he wills it through a new man. Therefore, he
shows us the way to this new culture in that which is most personal
to man, in man’s Longing, or yearning, or craving,—in man’s
Sehnsucht,—a word of profound import to which none of these
English words does justice.
To many ears that program does not sound provocative,
promising, alluring. Sehnsucht is not a feeling that makes one happy
and blissful—not a feeling to which one would like to accord a
constant and abiding possession of one’s heart. “Only he who knows
Sehnsucht knows what I suffer”—so sighed Goethe’s Mignon, one of
the most impressive and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever
created, an Incarnate Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing
of soul, in Heimweh for a dreamily visioned distance, to walk in
whose sunny beauty her feet were never destined. To preach
Sehnsucht is to preach hunger. To hunger is to ache. The gnawing of
a hungry stomach—but what is that compared with the gnawing of a
hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great and
worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible, to
passionate longing? Sehnsucht is not anxiety, it is worse than
anxiety. Anxiety is petty; Sehnsucht is great and deep. In anxiety, life
is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In Sehnsucht, life
is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. Sehnsucht sees all light in a
magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering
attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to
a rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods!
Tantalus, the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as
soon as he longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human
heart’s deepest pain, this is Sehnsucht. Whoever names a pain that
is not Sehnsucht has not peered to the bottom of pain’s chalice.
“Woe to that man through whom Sehnsucht comes!” we might
almost cry. If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the
impossible that is in me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never
find satisfaction, which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its
own self. If you love men, save them from their very youth up in the
presence of that tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where
all solid shores vanish, all safe harbors are closed—save men,
trembling, untranquil, from the everlasting question: Knowest thou
the land? Knowest it well? Leave men their peace of mind, add no
fuel to the flame of their discontent. Do not wrong them by letting
them eat of the tree of knowledge. Do not show them the infinite
expanse unrolling behind and beyond the narrow confines of their
petty lives, thus spoiling the pleasure of their contentment, the joy
they have in their limited and longingless life. Paradise is better than
Wilderness. The familiar murmur of the brook in the meadow by the
old home is more restful than the roar of the cataract or than the
eternal haunting mystery and melody of the great sea. Such is the
common cry of the lackadaisical, the longingless, the laissez-faire
people to all of us who “turn the world upside down.”
Yes, we make all men sufferers—we who pilot their minds to what
is not yet there, and to what they not yet are—we who show them a
land lying undiscovered in mist or azure ahead of them. We make
man seekers, we become disturbers of the peace—this is what they
call our crime and blasphemy. Therefore, men give us a wide berth,
warn others against our society, afraid of the yearning and hot
hunger of soul which would come over them, were they once to
hanker after a different fare from what they light upon in their
troughs every morning, gorging themselves to an easy satiety—a
different fare that would make them hunger ever anew, and arouse
them to new longings. No, comfort men; free them from their painful
Sehnsucht; teach them the foolishness of hitching their wagons to
stars; tell them that all is well with them and make them content
with any lot in life that may by chance be theirs! Then you will be
their true benefactors; then you will heal the wounds from which the
heart would otherwise so easily bleed!
Really? That is a good thing to do for men? The wise thing to say
to the heart is: Break your wings in two, so you will not be tempted
to brave the blue, to keep company with “the distant sea,” to explore
the Afar? The comforting thing to do for the slave is to gild his
chains, so that he may have joy in their glittering splendor and show
them off as worth their weight in gold? How easy it would be then
for the Czar of all the Russias “to go to Berlin if it costs me my last
peasant!” How easy for the Vatican to silence the modernist! Throne
and altar, an entente cordiale indeed, could then enjoy by “divine
right” an unmolested and unworried repose upon a world of dumb,
blind, brute peasants. But—

If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—

By nature’s law design’d—
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?

Why did God implant Sehnsucht in the heart of man? “Thou hast
made us for Thyself and the heart is restless until it rests in Thee,”
said Augustine long ago. Indeed, God is but another human name
for Eternal Yearning.
All yearning is love—love that silently and secretly celebrates its
triumphal entry into the soul. If you stood at the grave of a joy and
felt pain over that which was lost, would not the pain of yearning be
the measure, the consciousness, of your newly-awakened, ever-
waking love? Would you like to calculate this yearning and exchange
therefor coldness and indifference of heart? And if you felt a love so
full and deep that moments had eternities concealed in them, even
so, on the basis of this love yearning would live more than ever, it
would open up to the soul new vistas, new goals, it would give love
her life; and a love without yearning, which did not see beyond
itself, did not love above itself, finished in that which it was, or it
called its own—would quickly cease to be love. Yes, yearning
redoubles all genuine love to man; it involves something becoming,
something greater, purer, for which love lays the foundation and
gives the impulse. Only he who knows yearning, knows what I love,
so Mignon might have also said. There is something unslaked,
unslakable, in every love, an insatiable hunger for more love, for
better and purer love.
It is this yearning that saves love from being blind; it gives love
the strength and courage of veraciousness; it plunges the heart into
a struggle of desperation when a man of our love does not keep his
promise, when he becomes pettier and baser than we had believed
of him; and yet in this struggle it achieves the victory of faith which
mounts above all the pettiness and baseness of the man, to the
certainty of its strength, that love faileth never. In every love we love
something higher than itself, something for which the heart is
destined and endowed. This is the yearning in our love, a will, which
stirs in all deep feeling of the heart, and guards against the death
which every moment, sufficient only for itself, harbors. Every love,
therefore, is itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow
beyond a truth; love for righteousness is hunger and thirst after
righteousness. In all the beauty that greets the eye and awakens
exultation and joy in the heart, the soul ripens new sensitivity for
new visions of the wonders of life, the heart widens so that it
absorbs strength for new beauty and sees new beauty even in the
darkness and dust of earth. A man without yearning is a man
without love. And if one would guarantee man that satisfaction
which one prizes as the most beautiful and most blissful lot on earth,
then one must first stifle his heart or tear it from his breast; for as
long as this heart still beats, and announces in every beat its
insatiable hunger for love, so long will the man harbor and feel his
yearning, which will not let the beating heart be satisfied.
But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love—of
these we have been thinking—it is also life, the true life of man. The
man who lives only for himself, and for the passing moment, does
not live at all. And this is what Nietzsche says of man—man a
transition and an end—yearning always interring an Old, always
swinging a bridge across to a New—love loving the most distant and
most future—vision sweeping up the ages to higher man. This, then,
is man’s hour of great self-contempt. All his happiness, his wealth,
his knowledge, his virtue, seems too little to fill his soul. There is
insufficiency, nausea, as to all that he esteems, a cry of wrath from
the deep of his being, a cry that sounds like madness to all who call
themselves good and righteous, to all who call their execrable
smugness a delight.
But this is the great tumultuous yearning, the thunder of whose
soaring wings is forever in modern ears. It proffers man a new table
of values; forward, not backward, shall he look; love Kinderland, the
undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to
the children for their being the children of their fathers!
In this song of jubilee of yearning, who does not hear the old ring,
which was once preached as glad tidings, as gospel of humanity!
There, too, it was the seeking that were saved, the hungering and
not the sated, the starving and not the full. And they, too, had their
Higher Man—the Christ they called Him, their Yearning, their Love,
their Life. They sang: For me to live is Christ; I live, yet not I; Christ
lives in me. And as long as this Yearning lived in them, they were
creative spirits. They put a new face upon the world. They
transformed the world after the image of their Higher Man. A living,
a socially organized Yearning, this is what the whole Middle Age was,
with its Below and its Above, where each lower man had in each
higher man a rung of the heavenly ladder on which he should climb
to a higher existence. A yearning hewn in stone, that was their
dome; yearning they sang in their most impressive hymns and
masses; and yearning breathed all those celestial figures as they
lifted their glorified eyes to the Higher Man of Heaven, the Man
Thorn-crowned, Crucified and Risen.
Then the glow of this yearning was cooled by the cold north wind
of reality. Yearning petrified. There was no inclination to keep it from
dying. They were swift to deal it a deadly blow. They thought they
had accomplished marvels to have torn themselves loose from it.
“No more Sehnsucht now,” they said, “for we have found happiness!”
They smirked and they blinked. Their Higher Man died along with
their yearning. The scholars indeed had discovered that this Higher
Man was only “man,” a Jewish rabbi whom the people of his day
mistakenly held to be a Higher Man, a Messiah, but who now to
them themselves and to all moderns belongs to Lower Man, to Past
Man. To be sure, it goes against the grain of all of them for their
Higher Man to vanish from life, from the yearning of man. Therefore,
they seek painfully and anxiously for a “Dignity” which they may still
claim for their human Jesus. Above all, they thus forget that the
Higher Man can never lie behind us, but only before us, not beside
us, on a level with us, but only above us. Therefore, all their
scholarship cannot rescue the Higher Man for us, and cannot give us
back the Great Yearning. Only the living heart can do this, the heart
that creates out of its own mystery a yearning. That heart with this
yearning will overcome and retire the man of today—all who play the
game as lords of today. The modern man of yearning looks beyond
himself, works beyond himself, for a Man as high above present-day
man as once the Christusbild was above the men of the long-lost
past—a Man who will bear all the deeps of the world and all the
deeps of its woes in his heart, while at the same time thirsting in its
deepest depths for the eternities. This great yearning, this suffering
and loving yearning, this is more than all the wisdom of the scribes,
all the subtleties and hairsplittings of the theologians, this is the
sacred womb from which a Christ life is born ever and ever again.
“Only he who knows yearning, knows what I live!”—so might
Mignon’s dear words be changed yet again. To save the Sehnsucht is
to save the soul. Also sprach Goethe—Nietzsche!
 The Wicked to the Wise
Arthur Davison Ficke

“A brilliant mind, gone wrong!” ...

O tell me, ye who throng
The beehives of the world, grow ye not ever weary of this song?

“The way our fathers went.” ...

Yes, if our days were spent
Sod-deep, beside our fathers’ bones, wise, needless were your
argument.

“The wisdom of the mass.” ...

Thank God, it too shall pass
Like the breathed film hiding the face grayly within the silvered
glass.

“All’s surely for the best!” ...

Aye, so shall be confessed
By your sons’ sons, marking where down we smote you as we
onward pressed.
 The Viennese Dramatists
Erna McArthur

O ne does not know quite how the modern literary movement in

Vienna arose. Suddenly, some twenty years ago, there were
some active young writers called “Young Vienna,” in a collective
way, who were supposed to be revolutionary and bent on originality.
In reality these young people had no definite literary program such
as had been issued in Berlin by the leaders of the new naturalist
movement. They were a circle of friends, who had heard of the new
and wonderful things that had been done. They came to know Ibsen
and the great Russian and French novelists; they were of the
generation which was to be moved to the utmost by the philosophy
of Nietzsche. Of course these influences had been working in the
whole German-speaking world. Art was being taken seriously again
and the young people were yearning to produce something new and
original of their own.
Hauptmann had started a kind of revolution in Germany by his
first play, Before Sunrise, and the Viennese, who lived a little isolated
in their town, grew excited and enthusiastic over these doings.
A young writer, Hermann Bahr, was a kind of apostle for the new
art in Vienna. He was a man of agility, capable of unbounded
enthusiasm, who could go into ecstasy for all kinds of movements—
for realism as well as neo-romanticism, for Ibsen and Zola, for
Maeterlinck and d’Annunzio. He had been traveling about in Europe,
had come in touch with all the leading personalities, and had
brought the news home to his Viennese friends; he wanted to make
a new Vienna in every way. A few years later he was active in
organizing the young painters, sculptors, and architects, who
evolved a very original and striking art.
So it came to pass that Hermann Bahr was considered the leader
of everything modern—which meant “crazy” to the good citizen of
the day. It was this same milieu of the citizen, the bourgeois, that
produced all the young writers. In consequence, they were
absolutely anti-bourgeois in their way of looking at things, in the
very natural contrast of fathers and sons. Hence, too, they had a
certain culture, good manners, and a predominant interest in
æsthetic questions, as there had been no occasion for them to know
the primitive cares of life. But they were tired of the narrowness and
tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted to do things differently—to
live and love differently; to put art into their surroundings, their
dwellings, their dress; good taste—this had been a tradition of the
old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when the middle-class
element obtained its precedence over the old aristocracy—was now
to take its place again.
Apart from the dislike of these Viennese young men for the
bourgeoisie there were really very few positive tendencies that could
join them into a group. Consequently very different artistic
individualities developed. Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, the two most representative, have very little in
common in their work. But there was a spirit of friendship among all
of them; they liked to meet in the cafés, which had always been
Vienna’s center of social life, and to talk things over—the lightest
and the deepest. A certain café used to be famous as the center of
the young literary world. The old people who didn’t like the whole
business called it the café of the crazy self-worshippers (something
to that effect), and this title has stuck to it since. Today, the house
has been demolished, its glory has passed, but there are still legends
and stories told of the wonderful talk, the hot and breathless
debates that once filled these rooms from morning till night—and till
morning again.
In all this there was no real rebellion against any local literary
tradition. The great Austrian writers of the past always held their
own places; but the great dramatists did not reign on the stage of
that day. It was nearly exclusively devoted to the French salon-play
—Dumas, Augier, and their German imitators. Naturally a generation
which looked for the true and real in art could not have much in
common with these.
But there were certainly some features in Grillparzer and
Anzengruber felt as congenial by the moderns. Grillparzer had
possessed a sensuous softness, a musical beauty of language
foreign to the contemporary North German. Thus an element of
color and light—the soul of modern impressionism—entered in his
creations, breaking through the severe contours characteristic of his
generation, though in general he set great value on the strict
architectonic upbuild of his dramas. In his tragedy of Hero and
Leander perhaps the warmest love tragedy ever written in the
German language, a strongly realistic description of Viennese type is
hidden among the Greek clothing. Hero, consecrated priestess, who
forgets her vows when she sees Leander, first full of reserve, then
letting herself go in a full passion, might be the grandmother of
Schnitzler’s sweet girl out of the suburb. Here she wears a charming
Greek dress, her lonely tower stands on the seashore, and her lover,
Leander, must swim through the whole Hellespont to reach her. The
modern poet makes it easier for his heroes; the tower gets to be a
little room in a Viennese suburb and a walk in the twilight through a
few quiet streets brings him to his goal without much exertion. (And
so you might find other parental traits between the two Austrians.)
There is a melancholy strain in Grillparzer’s personality and work
which Schnitzler seems to have inherited. Side by side with the light-
mindedness and ease of the Austrian, a certain tired melancholy and
resignation seem to dwell. This sounds through many creations of
Austrian artists. We hear it in Schubert’s music and feel it in the
charming plays of Ferdinand Plaimund, who saw the harmony only in
an upper sphere of fairies and magicians, whereas the life of the
human beings seemed tumultuous and disordered to him.
Austria did not make it easy for her gifted children, and Grillparzer
suffered all his life in his official career. It oppressed him and warped
his creative power. Ludwig Anzengruber had to suffer under the
same disadvantages, but he had a greater fund of good humor to
set against it. He was a man of vigor and lebensbejahung
(affirmation of life). Anzengruber was called the herald of naturalism
and the Berlin people counted him as one of their number, producing
his plays together with those of Ibsen and Hauptmann on the Berlin
Free Stage.
Anzengruber applied the heightened sense for reality characteristic
of modern art—be it called naturalistic or neo-romantic—to his own
work and introduced a new material to the drama. The peasant story
had been treated up to now in a moralizing way. The idyl of country
innocence was to be shown and towns-people were to see the purer
heart’s sentiment under the dirtier shirts. Anzengruber showed the
peasants in their reality, neither better nor worse. His fingers are
unnatural and stiff in representing types of the cultured classes
speaking the literary German; his peasant types are of wonderful
vitality. There is the old stone-cutter who has thought out a deep
pantheistic philosophy. He relates it in his simple way: how it all
came to him—how he was lonely, poor, lying in his cottage up in the
mountains, how he saw the sun lying on the meadow and wanted to
live in the sunshine, not in his miserable hut when he felt near
dying. And then, out in the sunny meadow, it comes to him like a
revelation that he is not really ill, not really poor, because nothing
can happen to him—because everything around belongs to him and
he belongs to everything. This deep pantheistic feeling expressed in
this unpathetic way gives him from now on a perfect good humor
not to be disturbed. He goes among the peasants looking on at their
quarrelings and grumblings and helps them out of their worst plights
in a good-natured way, but without bothering them in the least with
his philosophy or any tendency toward improving them or the world
in general.
Anzengruber, with such religious views as he expressed here, had
to be opposed to the Catholicism in which he was brought up. He
fights against the clericalism which was weighing so heavily on the
peasants. He could feel their needs, for, though he was born in
Vienna and lived there nearly all his life, there was more country
than town blood in his veins. This connects him closer with
Hauptmann, the Silesian, so deeply influenced in his art by home
environment, than with any of the young Austrian writers who were
all born in the big towns and did not know what firm rooting in the
soil means. Anzengruber’s traditions could not be followed by them
and there is the greatest contrast between his strong energetic work
and the dainty, tender, delicate things produced by Schnitzler as the
first product of the young Viennese school just a year after
Anzengruber’s death. This was Anatol, a little work full of grace,
charm, and playfulness. The loose way in which the seven scenes
were connected only by Anatol’s figure was perfectly original. It was
really nothing but little sketches put into dialogues characteristic of
Vienna, the town whose special glamour consist in the dialogue of
ordinary conversation; the pretty chat of the drawing room, the café
raised to the dignity of a fine art; and with all this, having a
lightness, a delicacy, a frothiness, a wit, and a quality of sadness not
found anywhere else.
Women’s influence penetrated this art—in Austria just as in the
Latin countries the cult of women had always been a factor of
culture and with this generation of poets her triumphal epoch
started. She was put into the center. It was written around her and it
was written for her. Anatol belongs to those, for our days,
improbable beings who only live for love; erotics are his sole
occupation, his only profession. But he is not the victorious Don Juan
full of self-confidence; he is rather quiet, with a shade of agreeable
modesty,—a melancholic of love, he calls himself.
The young Hofmannsthal wrote an introduction to the work of his
friend in dainty verses. They expressed the spirit of this art
extremely well, so I will quote them partly, though it would require
an artist to translate them in good form. He says:
 Well, let’s begin the play,
Playing our own piece
Early matured, sad and tender,
Our own soul’s comedy;
Our feelings past and present,
Dark things lightly said,
Smooth words, joyous pictures,
Vague emotions, half experienced,
Agonies and episodes.

The sense of reality, which had been acquired in the school of Zola
and Ibsen, was used here to make travels of discovery into the most
interesting and unknown land of all—the over soul. And here the
complicated, the unusual inmoods and feelings and emotions
fascinated the young artists. Personality itself, though the center,
took rather a passive part,—it simply came to be the scene of action,
the meeting-place of all different impressions. People of the earlier
time had been expressionists who projected their own ego into the
outward world, whereas now they held themselves open to new
impressions, observed them and their effect on the I and then
reproduced their observations in artistic form. Impressionism,
predominant in painting at that time, had taken hold of literature. Of
course, this passivity could only be a stage of transition, because
each artistic individuality tends from the passive to the active; but
this impressionism was a good means of assimilating all the new
possibilities in the inside and outside world.
Schnitzler, born as the son of a famous Viennese physician, and
prepared to be a physician himself, was trained to observe. He had a
sure scientific eye for human problems, a kind, objective
benevolence, and tender forbearance for all sides of human life.
Anatol, his first work, is typical of all the following. Here we see
the principal figures, the complicated lover as hero, a friend as the
raisonneur,—a remembrance of the French play,—and seven
different types of womanhood. Here they all are—the simple sweet
girl, loving with her whole heart; the woman, who loves to play with
men; the lady of the world, she who would like to love, but has not
courage to do it.
The long line of his dramas, novels, and novelettes—for he tried to
express himself in all these forms—all speak of love and death. For
the pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol’s frivolousness. The
presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation—the end of
love, the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But
this permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of
this earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it
lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing
the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler’s most elementary
conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true—the
call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. A young girl hears
the call of life—she is fettered to the bedside of her ill father who
never lets her out of his sight. She must stay with him—always—
without the smallest pleasure, and suddenly she hears that the man
she loves, a young officer whom she has seen only once, when she
has danced in his arms a whole night long, must away to the war
never to return. She can stand it no longer; she gives her father
poison, the whole sleeping potion, and rushes away to him who is
her only thought. And now events go in a mad rush; she in his
room, unknown to himself, hidden behind a curtain, she sees the
woman he loves, the beautiful wife of his colonel, come to him. She
wants him to stay away from the war, save his life for her sake, and
then suddenly the colonel stands between the two and shoots down
his wife. The officer he leaves to judge himself. Over the corpse of
the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who can
belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these
breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy
dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room
for her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. But a wise
and kind friend explains the connection and wins her over to life
once more. These are his words—the drama’s conclusion: “You live,
Marie, and it was. Since that night too and that morning, the days
and nights go on for you. You walk through field and meadow. You
pluck the wayside flowers and you talk with me here under the
bright, friendly, midday sky. And this is living—not less than it was
on that night when your darkened youth beckoned you toward
gloomy adventures, which still today appear to you to be the last
word of your being. And who knows, if later, much later, on a day
like today, the call of the living will not cry within you much deeper,
and purer, than on that day in which you have lived through things
which are called by such terrible and glowing names as murder and
love.”
The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last
beautiful words. It is Schnitzler’s greatest art to lift us to a sphere
where everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and
melancholy and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His
technique is full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its
place, its importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening,
the reality of a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of
a hasty word.
The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated,
refined men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the
several circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men,
furnished material for his work; and even more than the people, the
town itself grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city,
where the fashionable society meets at certain hours and
fashionable little shops line the streets, the lonely little streets of the
suburb, the wonderful charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the
town with its soft rounded lines—all this rich flowering beauty that
had surrounded him from childhood he gathered in his work.
Perhaps more forcibly than any one else he brought Vienna’s charm
to our consciousness. And so he returned to Vienna what he had
received from her.
Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu—The Green
Cockatoo, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian
atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution;
and Beatrice’s Veil, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost
every artist in those days. This epoch’s refinement, the powerful
personalities peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the
enjoyment of their life—in all this they saw something akin to their
own life’s ideal.
Schnitzler’s plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like
Manet’s small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft
contours diffused in light.
He made one attempt at a drama in big, unusually big,
dimensions. It takes about six hours to perform on the stage, longer
than the second part of Goethe’s Faust; it is a historic play of the
Napoleonic time called The Young Medardus, but the Emperor
himself remains in the background and only his shadow lies on the
events. These take place in Vienna at the time that Napoleon had
reached Austria on his triumphal march and resided for the time in
Schonbrun, the Hapsburg’s castle near Vienna. The Viennese people
as a mass are characterized—these people so easily moved, so easily
influenced, growing enthusiastic now for Napoleon, now in a hasty
patriotic emotion for their own Emperor, principally wanting one
thing: to see some exciting spectacle, to hear news, to speak over
interesting happenings. The broadest part of the drama is occupied
by a love episode between the hero Medardus—a cousin, if not a
brother of Anatol, only about a hundred years back—and the
beautiful, proud, cold Duchess of Valois, who is in Vienna to intrigue
against Napoleon, claiming the right to the French throne for herself
and her own family. The work is full of beautiful and interesting
episodes, but there is not enough architectonic power to join them
together to a unity.
It is too early to view Schnitzler in a historic way—he is fifty years
old and in the middle of his work; certainly he signified much for his
own generation, for they felt themselves understood by him and he
influenced and even formed their attitude and feeling. Whether his
figures have enough of the timelessness, of the deep, full-rounded
humanity which will give them power to speak to future generations
I do not know. In a mood of paradoxical humor, Schnitzler himself
criticised his own creation more severely than any critic could. We
see a marionettes’ theater on the stage; the public there, eager for
the play; the marionettes appear—all Schnitzler’s own figures: the
complicated hero, the sweet girl, the demonic woman, and so on.
The poet is there, full of excitement. The marionettes are to give his
new play, but there is a rebellion. The marionettes want to do what
pleases them, live their own life. In the midst of confusion, a
mysterious man appears on the stage with a long naked sword in his
hand; he cuts through the threads; the marionettes fall in a heap.
The poet asks, half grateful, half bewildered, “Who are you?” But the
unknown man cannot tell him; he is an enigma to himself. He
wanders through the world and his sword makes it apparent who
only is a doll, who a man. Schnitzler doomed his figures with more
severity to the fate of dolls than is due them.
The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond
the town’s limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different
person from Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively
aesthetic valuation of things in common. But what was expressed
more naively in Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal.
He joined a group of men with a strict “Art for Art’s sake” program,
exclusive and intended only for the few. The principal of this group
was Stefan George, a lyric poet who had fashioned the German
language into poems of such beauty of form as to rival the poetry of
the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or Verlaine. It was an art that
irritated people somewhat, like that of the Cubists and Futurists. It
was extremely hard to understand; the sense organs were mixed up,
as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones, and colored sounds.
Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and form, grew to
be his follower.
These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art
was crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic
world, Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their
models; with these the great artists of form, Swinburne and
d’Annunzio. It was an eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old
and modern cultures equally well.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the
aesthete, with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today
frequently in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with
a preference for a deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant
young gentlemen who liked to appear in frock coats with ties and
waistcoats fabulously gay of color. Also, in their surroundings their
liking went to the utmost refinement and luxury. They loved the
dignified, the sensational, the sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal
certainly blessed his parents for giving him a well-sounding,
sonorous name.
He had a great talent as a lyricist, and as an essayist, with the
finest understanding for all foreign cultures as long as they
responded to something in his own soul. His dramas are not in any
way related to Vienna. He perused all history’s epochs and took the
material for his dramas from the Orient, out of the Italian
Renaissance (his favorite epoch), and the classic art of the Greek.
Many of his plays are not intended as original creations, but
arrangements of older works. So he did with an old pre-
Shakespearean English play by Thomas Otway and with the old
mystery play Everywoman. Some of his little plays are lovely—the
death of Titian gives a vision of the dead extravagance of Venice
equalled by few modern productions. His most interesting attempt is
an arrangement of Elektra for the modern stage. His Greeks are
barbarous, wild, full of unbroken primitive instincts. They are under
the influence of an extreme nervous hysteria. Nietzsche had spoken
of the Greek hysteria, which slumbered under their apparent
serenity. Hofmannsthal put a picture of horror on the stage that
keeps the spectator spellbound from the first to the last minute.
Through the concentration in one act this intensity is still increased.
Since Richard Strauss put Elektra into music, Hofmannsthal has
devoted his art entirely to this composer. His last works are written
as libretti for Strauss operas, and go through the world now in the
wake of his music.
Finally, I would like to tell of a strange Viennese personality, no
dramatist, but just as little a novelist, epic or lyric poet. The name of
this man, who cannot be put into any of the ordinary literary
compartments, is Peter Altenberg. He thought that most of the
things told in dramas of five, or three, or only one act, were
superfluous; the essential could be told in three lines as a rule. He
wishes to give the extract and the reader might work it out for
himself. He only writes very short sketches, apparently perfectly
usual things, out of every-day life. But he discovered a little secret,
namely, that the ordinary is really the most wonderful. Miracles do
not exist any more, but the miraculous is there, everywhere. Fairy
Tales of Life he calls one of his books (in which he collects a number
of sketches); but he might call them all by the same name. As in
Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird the wonderful is everywhere, but we have not
the eyes to see it. Well, Peter Altenberg has these eyes. His little
sketches would seem untranslatable. They might seem, in a different
language, perfectly banal little things, not worth the relating,—but
suddenly a veil is removed and we see the world and things in a new
light.
Peter Altenberg uses the most original style—one might call it a
telegram style; it is very abrupt without any endeavor at a
connected literary form. He wants, as he says himself, to describe a
man in one sentence; an event of the soul on one page; a landscape
with one word.
Everybody in Vienna knows Peter Altenberg. He is a poet of the
street, who goes around and writes down his little sketches
wherever he may be—principally in the cafes.
All the women must love him—for he has sung their praises all his
life, like a minnesinger of the Middle Ages.
 Editorials

Some Emma Goldman Lectures in Chicago

B eginning October 25, and continuing for three weeks, Miss

Goldman is to give a series of new lectures in the Assembly
Hall of the Fine Arts Building—an event which has already
filled us with the keenest anticipations. There will be three on the
war:—Woman and War, War and Christianity, and The Sanctity of
Property as a Cause of War. There will be a series on the drama,
as the mirror of rebellion against the tyranny of the past:—an
introductory one on the significance of art in its relation to life,
and others on the new Scandinavian, Italian, German, French,
Russian, Yiddish, American, and English drama. These will be
given on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and
offer sufficient richness for one season. But there is even more.
On Monday and Wednesday nights, at East End Hall on Erie and
Clark Streets, Miss Goldman will deliver six general propaganda
lectures, all dealing with the labor problem and the sex question.
Tickets will be on sale at the office of The Little Review; at The
Radical Book Shop, 817½ North Clark Street; and may be had
also from Dr. Reitman, 3547 Ellis Avenue. How interesting it will
be to watch that part of the audience which attends the war and
the drama talks as perfectly “safe” subjects making its discovery
that the lecturer is a woman of simple nobility and sweetness, and
that her propaganda is a matter of truth rather than of terror.
The Philistinization of College Students

A very interesting correspondent sends us the sort of letter we

should rather have received than any other sort we can
conceive of. It is quoted in full on another page of this issue.
In it he asks if The Little Review will not succeed in creating a
Drang und Sturm epoch; if it will not “stir the hearts of college
men and women—those who have not yet been completely
philistinized by their ‘vocational guides’; college men and women
who in other countries have always been the torch-bearers, the
advance-guard and martyrs in the fights for truth and ideals.” It
was a definite impulse in this direction which gave birth to The
Little Review; and while, after seven months, we cannot hope to
have turned the world inside out the way it should be turned, we
are sufficiently sanguine to believe that we have made a
beginning. We are so close to the Drang und Sturm ourselves that
perhaps we cannot see clearly. But we can hope, with that
intensity which makes The Little Review our religion, that these
things will come to pass. Incidentally, we believe in colleges on
the same general basis that we believe in many other disciplines:
it is impossible ever to learn too much on any subject. But we
know there is something seriously wrong with the colleges; and a
far graver danger than philistinization seems to us to lie in that
hysterical confusion of values which causes our college students
to see small things as big ones and to let the big ones slip by.

Witter Bynner on the Imagists

I n sending us Apollo Sings, Mr. Bynner remarks that it is more

fun, for the moment to take a classic theme and mix it, with a
little Whitman, into an anagram of rhyme than to imitate the
Japanese and try to found a school. He goes on: “In spite of
several lovely attempts, Pound’s chiefly, the rest seeming to me
negligible, they’ve not approached the poetess Chiyo’s lines to her
dead child:

I wonder how far you have gone today,

Chasing after dragonflies—

or Buson’s

Granted this dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world,

This granted, yet—

I’m ungrateful to look critically toward an attempt to plant in

English these little oriental flowers of wonder. If only they would
acknowledge the attempt for what it is and not bring it forward
with a French name and curious pedantries! Isn’t the old name for
this sort of poem Haikai or something of that sort? At any rate,
there is a name. I ought to know it. And so ought they.”

A Rebel Anthology

W illiam D. Haywood, veteran of many labor battles and

foremost exponent of the militant unionism in America, is
adding to his manifold activities that of compiler and editor.
He purposes the formation of an anthology of poems by social
rebels, principally of those who have been connected with the
activities of the Industrial Workers of the World. In the book will
be included poems by Arturo Giovannitti, Covington Hall, Francis
Buzzell, George Franklin, Charles Ashleigh, and others. Mr.
Haywood wishes to show, by this publication, the spirit of art
which is manifesting itself in the working-class movement. He
maintains that the heightened consciousness of the workers is
beginning to express itself through an adequate and distinctive
poetical medium.
 New York Letter
George Soule.

E astern publishers have been much amused by the advertising of

The Eyes of the World spread over full pages of the recent
magazines. The burden of the appeal to the public is, first, that
we have been overrun with immoral books; second, that clergymen,
editors, and all other forces of decency are powerless to stop the
flood; third, that Mr. Harold Bell Wright has sprung to the front as
the great leader against the vicious influence of the other writers by
the production of his latest novel; and fourth, that the whole battle
will be won if the public will step into the nearest bookshop and pay
$1.35 net for Mr. Wright’s book. From the glowing moral tone of the
advertisement one might think it the work of an uplift committee;
but in small type at the bottom is a copyright notice bearing the
name of the president of Mr. Wright’s publishing house. This
gentleman is undoubtedly deeply sincere in his admiration of Mr.
Wright’s work and its influence, but in this case his admiration has
led him to a somewhat ingenuous confusion of moral and business
motives. It reminds one of the tactics of the billboard advertising
men who, when they discovered that billboard advertising was being
strongly attacked by those who object to the disfigurement of our
countryside, put up a large number of biblical posters to curry favor
with simple religious souls—and were afterwards so injudicious as to
boast of their cleverness in Printer’s Ink.
The effectiveness of Mr. Wright’s plea is somewhat prejudiced by
his own case. His novel sets forth the thesis that in order to make an
artistic or literary success it is necessary only to resort to flattery and
corruption. But his own novels have for some years been far more
popular than those of most competitors. Is it pure perversity that
makes his hated rivals reject his obviously successful methods in
favor of the despicable ones which he so vehemently attacks?
We wish only that someone with an equal enthusiasm for
artistically moral literature would try a similar advertising campaign
for a genuine artist. Such advertisements might set forth the facts
that the bookshops are being overrun with mediocre novels which
make successes by pandering to untruth and public prejudice, that
the work of genius is in danger of being choked out by the insincere
product of commercial writers, and that the best way to promote the
interests of good literature would be to buy in large quantities the
novels of John Galsworthy or Romain Rolland! But, alas, such a
campaign is impossible in a commercial democracy—it wouldn’t pay!
A respectable number of the best publishers have already aroused
themselves to the impropriety—or at least to the eventual
ineffectiveness—of announcing extreme praises of their own
publications even in the critical vein. Surely the book-reading public
can’t be made to believe that four or five “great novels” are issued
every year. Surely they would be grateful for a little genuine
information about the books they are asked to buy. And so these
publishers have issued for two years a monthly circular entitled New
Books, which contains descriptions of important new publications
without praise of any kind. It would be telling tales out of school to
say how carefully the publishers’ copy-writers must be watched in
order to prevent them from slipping dubious phrases into their
notes. Some advertising men seem to have principles against giving
any candid information about what they have for sale. But the task
has been accomplished so far, and it remains to be seen whether
this civilized form of advertising can make much progress against the
advertising vandalism which destroys the effectiveness of all publicity
by extravagant statements. One begins to suspect that the effort is
pitifully Utopian in a state of economic savagery like the present,
where every man’s attention is more naturally directed to his profits
than to the honesty of his work. The chances would be better if the
majority of the public knew what intellectual honesty is and really
wanted it.
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookultra.com