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.
Considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion.
Pericles Lewis is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His past publications explore the development of modern literary forms in a period of political and social instability and include Modernism, Nationalism and the Novel (Cambridge, 2000) and The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge, 2007).
'In this book, as in his two earlier ones, Pericles Lewis finds a
new perspective on twentieth-century literature and demonstrates in
surprising and convincing ways the depth and complexity of
religious vision in the greatest modernist novels. With an
impressive breadth of learning and an exact command of language and
structure, this book finds in the work of Henry James, Marcel
Proust, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce a
contradictory, self-doubting approach to religious meanings unlike
those of most religious writing in the past three millennia, but
profoundly religious meanings none the less. What makes the book so
decisively convincing is that its approach illuminates patterns of
structure and meaning that were unnoticed until now even in these
deeply studied authors, but which, thanks to Lewis' alert,
sympathetic readings, now seem unmistakably central.' Edward
Mendelson, Columbia University
'Lewis's book is a masterly analysis of the transmutation of
religious experience in the modernist novel ... The richness of
[the] book lies in its vivid and persuasive detail, and the careful
cross-referencing between chapters.' The Times Literary
Supplement
'... 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
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