Literature and Theology Advance Access published online on May 23, 2007
Literature and Theology, doi:10.1093/litthe/frm013
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The Angel Club: Allen Upward and the Divine Calling of Modernist Literature
Queen Mary, University of London, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS
s.hobson{at}qmd.ac.uk
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This article focuses on Allen Upward's plans to form an Angel Club or an Order of the Seraphim as described in articles published in the New Age and the New Freewoman in 1910 and 1913. It interrogates the significance of these plans to a Modernist movement that is often assumed to be secular in outlook and reveals that, despite retaining some of the angel's traditional attributes, this figure is absolutely of its time, representing an unlikely alliance of art with Nietzschean philosophy and Modernist theology. Among the questions discussed in detail are the ethical distinction that Upward makes between his own artist-angel and Nietzsche's Overman, the role of R.J. Campbell's The New Theology in suggesting an evolutionary basis for the idea that man might evolve into an angel and the echoes of Upward's Angel Club in Ezra Pound's Order of the Brothers Minor and D.H. Lawrence's Order of the Knights of Rananim.