“The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone Called Him”: Modernist Novels and the Reimagination of Sacred Spaces

This dissertation is to explore the interactive relationship between English literary modernism and religion through modernist novels’ using of sacred spaces. My argument is that in response to the increasing alienation between churches and characters in the 19^th century literature, modernists very actively seek to address the need for religion through refashioning traditional religious sites, or finding new significance in buildings/environments that bear religious connotations.

Starting by briefly reviewing a few Victorian novels, which feature the distancing relationship between characters and churches, this dissertation will devote its main chapters to works by D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. M. Forster and Samuel Beckett. First, Lawrence’s richly documented, yet often ignored, churchgoing experiences signal a desire to reoccupy the church space to accommodate his Vitalistic life worship. In comparison, in Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom symbolically leaves the church to embrace the vibe of the city, and the city, as an expanded church space, provides the setting for a ritualized civic life that transcends Ireland’s sectarian rift. Then, in Forster’s A Passage to India, further afar from the city, the wilderness that stages the Hindu

celebration is aligned with a form of democracy with cosmic appeal, one that seeks to change the post-Great-War political order. Finally, the dissertation takes a brief look at the novels by Samuel Beckett and Evelyn Waugh from the 1930s and 40s, investigating how sacred spaces in the novel transform along the changing political climates.