Religious Experience and the Modernist NovelThe 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. |
Contents
Churchgoing | 1 |
Gods afterlife | 23 |
Henry James and the varieties of religious experience | 52 |
Marcel Proust and the elementary forms of religious life | 81 |
Franz Kafka and the hermeneutics of suspicion III | 111 |
Virginia Woolf and the disenchantment of the world | 142 |
The burial of the dead | 170 |
Notes | 193 |
| 223 | |
| 232 | |
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Abraham Bloom Cambridge Castle Catholic characters Charlotte Christian church conflict critics culture Dalloway Dante dead death definition Durkheim Elementary Forms Emile Durkheim episode Erich Auerbach Essays faith father figure final find first Franz Kafka Freud ghost golden bowl Guermantes Henry James historical human identified imagines influence interpretation James Joyce James’s Jewish Jews Josef K Joyce Joyce’s Judaism Kafl<a Larkin’s liberal Lighthouse literary Literature Maggie Maggie’s magical Marcel Proust Max Weber modern novel monotheism Moses and Monotheism narrator narrator’s nineteenth century novelists one’s Oxford Paddy Dignam political problem profane Protestant Ethic Ramsay Ramsay’s Recherche reflect religion religious experience Remembrance ritual sacred sacrifice secular seems sense shared fictions Sigmund Freud social society soul specifically spiritual Stephen story Strether sublime suggests supernatural Swann symbol T. S. Eliot theology theory thought Totem traditional trans twentieth century Ulysses University Press Verdurin Victorian Virginia Woolf William James wrote York