ABSTRACT
Religion and spirituality are central to the work of Katharine Burdekin. In Swastika Night (1937) and other published and unpublished texts from the 1930s, Burdekin treats Nazism as a broad bahsed popular political religion grounded in paligenetic myth. However, much like other modernist writers, Burdekin’s work also relies heavily on mythic creativity, and her characteristic combination of the English pastoral and myth is itself underpinned by historically contingent values. Drawing on archival research, I explore Burdekin’s treatment of myth in relation to religion, gender and sexuality, and finally ideology and utopia. I argue that Burdekin proceeds from an essentially Romantic conception of nature, and her critique of what Sayre and Löwy (1984) term “Romantic fascism” is premised on a more progressive “utopian Romanticism”.
