Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture - Doubting Moderns

Explores connections between literary figures and organized secularist movements and groups in the interwar period, with a focus on the works of Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, George Moore, D.H. Lawrence, and Mary Borden, among others.

List of contents

• Introduction


• 1: The Ethics of Unbelief in Vernon Lee and William James


• 2: H.G. Wells's 'Theological Excursion' and the Dialogue Novel


• 3: The 'Death of God' in New Testament Biofiction


• 4: Mary Butts and 'Belief in Belief' in Traps for Unbelievers, and Supernatural Stories


• 5: Naomi Mitchison's Rationalist Heresy and Speculative Humanism in Beyond this Limit


• 6: K.S. Bhat, Soma, and a Transnational Literature of Unbelief


• Conclusion: Literary Unbelief from 1945 to the Present

About the author

Suzanne Hobson is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature in the Department of English at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-1960 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and editor with Rachel Potter of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy (Salt, 2010). She has published articles and book chapters on a range of topics including religion and spirituality and modernist travel writing. She is past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies and co-organizer of the London Modernism Seminar.

Summary

Explores connections between literary figures and organized secularist movements and groups in the interwar period, with a focus on the works of Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, George Moore, D.H. Lawrence, and Mary Borden, among others.

Additional text

It mostly goes without saying that modernism was, by definition, an era of religious doubt and disillusionment... But in this fascinating new book by Suzanne Hobson of Queen Mary University of London, a different sense of the era emerges, one where committed secularism could invite critical sanctions and where open unbelief often met with polite silence from literary modernists.

Product details

• Authors: Suzanne Hobson, Suzanne ( Hobson, Suzanne (Reader in Twentieth-Century Liter Hobson, Suzanne (Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Cent Hobson, Hobson Suzanne
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2021
• EAN: 9780192846471
• ISBN: 978-0-19-284647-1
• No. of pages: 250
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, RELIGION / Theosophy, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Humanist & Secular Alternatives To Religion, Humanist and secular alternatives to religion