Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.

Pericles Lewis (Author)

9780521856508, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 January 2010

246 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.53 kg

'… describes an emergent preoccupation with the fact of death and its most salient aspect, the silence of one's ancestors; he sees the modern novel as self-consciously exploring an ultimately Pyrrhic yet essential and authentic need to connect with the dead … Lewis's readings are usually good and occasionally extraordinary: there are throughout exceptional moments of textual engagement.' Modern Philology

The modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. Such novelists as Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka found methods to describe through fiction the sorts of experiences that had traditionally been the domain of religious mystics and believers. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion. Through comparisons of major novelists with sociologists and psychologists from the same period, Lewis identifies the unique ways that literature addressed the changing spiritual situation of the early twentieth century. He challenges accounts that assume secularisation as the main narrative for understanding twentieth-century literature. Lewis explores the experiments that modernists undertook in order to invoke the sacred without directly naming it, resulting in a compelling study for readers of twentieth-century modernist literature.

Acknowledgements
1. Churchgoing
2. God's afterlife
3. Henry James and the varieties of religious experience
4. Marcel Proust and the elementary forms of religious life
5. Franz Kafka and the hermeneutics of suspicion
6. Virginia Woolf and the disenchantment of the world
7. The burial of the dead
Select bibliography
Index
Notes.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]