Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780521856508)

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.

Author: Pericles Lewis
ISBN-10: 0521856507
ISBN-13: 9780521856508
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/07/2010
Pages: 246
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2010