ABSTRACT

Postmodernity, in Jean-Franois Lyotard's famous account, announces the break-up of a single system of truth based on universal reason into a multitude of competing micro-narratives. This chapter describes the revisit some old and naive questions about Shelley and religion. David Tracy, the postmodern theologian, has recently described fragmentation as the spiritual situation of our times. Modern theism and atheism alike are forced to coexist as fragments of one another in the postmodern moment. The postmodernists' like Georges Bataille celebrate fragmentation as an expenditure without reserve which liberates us from the all-embracing restricted economy of modernity. Enlightenment thinkers themselves get walk-on parts, to be sure, but the spotlight remains firmly on the canonical thinkers of twentieth-century high Modernism. Romanticism, then, may not just be a period before Modernism but a period that calls into question modern accounts of periodicity and enables us to read the relationship between the modern and what precedes and succeeds it differently.