Introduction

Abstract

In 1924, naturalist J. Arthur Thomson eagerly announced that “the scientific picture of things as they are becomes more and more congruent with our conception of God, and may even enhance it. The modern scientific picture has given the material universe a new unity…. The world is one; fundamentally homogeneous; a universe, not a multiverse” (57). For Thomson and many others, the explosive theorizing of Albert Einstein and the discovery of radium by Marie Curie injected an air of mystery, ineffability, and abstraction into scientific ways of seeing the world, overturning the nineteenth-century mechanistic, deterministic “old” physics and inviting religious interpretations of science. Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse contends that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see the emergence of a discursive nexus of religion and science—in both orthodox and heterodox writings by scientists, theologians, and lay figures, and in literary and extraliterary writing. Moreover, this religio-scientific discourse, I argue, is deployed by modernist writers in ways that attempt to negotiate what has recently been called a “modernist crisis of embodiment” (McCabe, “Delight” 430), an apt term to describe an era in which the human body was increasingly seen as vulnerable to penetration—by everything from radio waves to medical instruments. Given that women writers and writers of color experienced that crisis particularly acutely, as these groups historically have been denied control over their own bodies, I focus specifically on the works of modernists H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer.

… our minds are winged, though our feet are clay.

—H.D.¹