Desecularizing Modernism: A Review of Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel

Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel investigates the predominant role of religion in European modernism. Analyzing the works of five canonical novelists, Lewis explores the various ways in which the ostensibly atheistic modernists seek religious experience outside the church. Though Lewis convincingly challenges the secularization thesis, which has been increasingly contested in recent years, his argument seems to depend on the slippage between a series of unqualified terms like “religious,” “transcendent” and “spiritual.” Nonetheless, Lewis’s book marks an important contribution to the secularization debate.