Love is at the centre of modern literature, and its role in a number of important modernist texts locates its cultural contexts all over the map: on the street, in the movie theatre, in religious devotion, in social history, in theology, and in a mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture where the sublime faces the obscene and passion confronts violence. The phenomena of love inform culture and haunt its subjects with temptations and taboos. The figures that I am naming ‘Madonnas of Modernism’ are female characters who are featured in secular modernist works as subjects and objects of desire. The path of love that these characters take includes resonances of mariolatry (the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary), mystical spirituality, and the cult of virginity (an investment of sacred powers, taboos, and social values across cultures).

The Madonnas of Modernism are particularly important in the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Joyce.