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  • All Good Books are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America by Una M. Cadegan
  • Tim Lacy
All Good Books are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America. By Una M. Cadegan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. 232pp. $39.95.

In All Good Books are Catholic Books, Cadegan argues that U.S. Catholics created a distinctive “alternate literary culture” that balanced (and occasionally opposed) “secular literary trends” with Catholic “categories and criteria for defining and evaluating literature.” And the literary critics within that culture facilitated, in the 1917–1966 period, a Catholic engagement of literary modernism and modernity that aided a transformation from hostility to American culture to an integration into, and comfort with, American style democracy and individualism. The importance of this critical engagement makes U.S. Catholic literary culture “a valuable and overlooked source” for understanding twentieth-century Catholic intellectual history (2).

Beginning with a brief mise-en-scène on the Catholic reception of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the author’s introduction deserves comment and praise. It brings numerous topics to the table – i.e. offers a definition of modernity, sets up Catholic theological problems with modernity and Americanism, discusses the importance of immigration, lays out the prominent critics and publishers, and names the controversial books and authors. Ultimately, Catholic literary culture, in coordination with the Catholic Action movement, had a “cosmic” vision to critique, reform, and redeem modernity as expressed in the United States (13–14). Cadegan’s introduction is one of the best I have read in terms of connecting print culture to the culture at large (esp. 5–7). [End Page 69] The book’s first half covers, chronologically, the 1900–1940 period. Chapter one works out how 1920s Catholic critics relied on Thomism, Dante, and the Bible to praise and damn new literary work. Critical criteria included the traditional categories of goodness, truth, and beauty – i.e. moral content, conformity to doctrine, and form (integrity, proportion, and clarity). Those criteria were used to judge the literary movement known widely as ‘realism’ (or ‘anti-supernaturalism’). Chapter two introduces the distinction between theological and literary modernism, with Cadegan positing multiple variants for each. She demonstrates how ambiguity in Pius X’s 1907 encyclical, Pascendi dominici gregis, created intellectual hurdles for historians, theologians, seminarians, and Catholic writers who tried to tease out the various strands of ‘modernity’ in American culture.

In this context, Cadegan sets up four “crucial” pairs of opposed terms that recur in subsequent chapters: “individual/community, iconoclasm/orthodoxy, innovation/repetition, and openness/closure” (62). She argues that Catholic critics did not turn these theses and antitheses into Hegelian syntheses, but operated, rather, within “complexly understood interrelations.” The critics “declined to choose one term over the other,” resulting in “an uneasily sustained balance” (62). Chapter three deals most directly with these pairs and Catholic critics’ attempts, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, to transcend the divides. Therein Cadegan discusses a broad swath of Catholics writing in America, Catholic World, Commonweal, and beyond. They offered their reflections on important modernist authors such as Willa Cather, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, Eugene O’Neill, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

As implied by Cadegan’s subtitle, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum is directly and thoroughly addressed. In two important chapters (four and five), Cadegan outlines how Catholic literary critics both accounted for the necessity of the Index and attempted to reconcile it with democratic ideals. In the first of these, Cadegan offers an invaluable but brief “history and function” of the Index by looking at histories of the same written by Americans. Chapter five deals with the mid-century tensions of upholding the Index, including procedural variability (i.e. decentralized decision making), the pursuit of scholarship, unintended consequences (i.e. censorship as advertising), and subjective, human assumptions smuggled into censorship decisions. Catholic defenses of censorship most often involved the argument that a “commitment to democracy . . . [also] required . . . protecting what society most treasured” (122).

Beginning with chapter six, Cadegan moves the narrative into the post-WWII period and ends in the mid-1960s with chapter eight. [End Page 70...

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