This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art, like that of social myth, can be seen as a form of religious experience. The theorisation of the experience of art as a form of religious experience illuminates the role of art in engendering social attitudes in opposition to economic materialism and capitalism. Based on these analyses, the arguments explore the ways in which a theory that defines the experience of art as a form of religious experience can help us to answer three questions of pressing interest for the contemporary moment: How can we read cultural texts to imagine forms of social belonging through which to challenge the isolation of economic materialism? How can we imagine cultural texts to create the collective relations necessary for social change in global capitalism? How can we define an ethics of satisfaction that does not relate to this capital modernity?
- ISBN10 1137434775
- ISBN13 9781137434777
- Publish Date 6 July 2015 (first published 14 January 2014)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
- Format eBook
- Pages 226
- Language English
- URL 10.1057/9781137434777