{"title":"The Ethics of Unbelief in Vernon Lee and William James","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 1 explores Vernon Lee’s argument for an ethics of unbelief and her struggle to practice this ethics in literature which, she feared, had an inbuilt tendency to comforting falsehoods. The first part of the chapter outlines Lee’s case against William James and Friedrich Nietzsche whose work, she felt, offered inducements to belief in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Lee shared the view of prominent Rationalists in thinking that James made it possible for his readers to believe in almost anything, except, that is, the arguments of unbelievers. Lee offered ‘responsible unbelief’—belief in the believable—as an altogether more rational, proportionate, and humble alternative to the immoderate and masculinist versions she found in her peers. The final section of this chapter explores Lee’s experimental fiction, Satan the Waster (1918), a genre-defying ‘novel’ in which Lee tests the extent to which imaginative literature can be made to serve a Rationalist agenda. The questions that Lee raises in Satan set the agenda for this book as a whole: given the ease with which language flows into necessary fictions, can literature ever accommodate or encourage unbelief in the strong ethical sense of belief only in the believable? What forms of representation, if any, might be adequate to the expression of a ‘responsible’ unbelief?","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123607662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ‘Death of God’ in New Testament Biofiction","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 examines the interwar revival and transformation of a genre that had a Rationalist agenda inbuilt: New Testament biofiction or, in Graham Holderness’s words, the Jesus-novel. Following in the wake of Higher Criticism, this enormously popular genre mixed biography and fiction in its retelling of the life and death of Jesus, a process that often reduced Christ to man rather than god, and the Gospels to literature rather than scripture. This chapter emphasizes the influence of George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916) on later versions of the Jesus-novel by D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Mary Borden, and Iwan Nashiwin. Moore’s version emphasizes the virtues of oral presentation as a means of getting the story straight; his vernacular approach sought to cut through the rhetorical tricks and literary seductions that disguised the truth of Jesus’s life and death on the cross. Lawrence and H.D. adopt a more heavily symbolic and stylized prose in their New Testament stories but do so with similar ends in mind. In engaging with the events of Jesus’s life, and especially those connected to the crucifixion and resurrection, these authors foreground questions of belief in a way that stories based on other historical and mythological lives do not. More pointedly, this chapter argues, they counter the popular view of unbelief as a recent or modern development by locating its origins at the very beginnings of Christianity itself.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124075772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Naomi Mitchison’s Rationalist ‘Heresy’ and Speculative Humanism in Beyond This Limit","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 5 examines Naomi Mitchison’s claim to be a Rationalist heretic and her attempts to reshape Rationalist priorities and values to better serve a new generation of left-leaning and feminist unbelievers such as herself. Mitchison was a life-long member of the Rationalist Press Association, though not always supportive of its aims. In articles and speeches, some of which were published in the RPA journal, she argued for a realignment of Rationalism to bring it closer to socialism, on the one hand, and, curiously, religion on the other. This was not, this chapter argues, a wholesale abandonment of Rationalist principles, especially not those concerning the limits of human knowledge. On the contrary, Mitchison re-orientates Rationalism in the direction of a speculative humanism that goes beyond the confines of scientific naturalism without sacrificing the primacy of human reason to some other, extra-human or godlike, way of knowing. This chapter turns to Beyond This Limit, the short novel Mitchison co-created with Wyndham Lewis, to explore the working out of her philosophy in fiction. Beyond This Limit posits the existence of an afterlife but in such a way as to suggest, that if this is to be a legitimate and rational form of conjecture, then the afterlife can only be imagined as an extension of the conditions of mortality—as a form of living on.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115371369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"H. G. Wells’s ‘Theological Excursion’ and the Dialogue Novel","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 2 presents H. G. Wells as the most famous case of a lapsed unbeliever in the interwar period and explores the impact of Wells’s ‘theological excursion’ on his wartime fiction. Wells conceived of an idiosyncratic version of ‘God’ that might explain, and offer consolation for, the existence of evil as seen in what would become its characteristic twentieth-century form in the First World War. Wells presented his theology in books of philosophy and novels which quickly became a target for Rationalist derision and ire. Wells responded in kind, answering his critics in letters to the Rationalist press and even including the most famous of his opponents as a character in The Undying Fire (1919). This chapter suggests that Wells’s argument with Rationalism gave direction and purpose to his literary experiments at this time. In Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and The Soul of a Bishop (1917) he moved decisively away from the example set by modernist fiction to a ‘spread-out’ form capable of addressing the paradox of evil. In The Undying Fire, he thought he had perfected both his fictional method and his theodicy. Described by Wells as a frank rewrite of the Book of Job, the novel presents Wells’s minimal theology in a form that no one could mistake for modernism.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125667077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"K. S. Bhat, Soma, and a Transnational Literature of Unbelief","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The final chapter provides an account of Soma (1931–4), the only little magazine from the period seemingly dedicated to the production and dissemination of a transnational literature of unbelief. The editor, K. S. Bhat, had links to the Rationalist Press Association as well as to progressive literary groups in London and India and these connections are manifest in the magazine’s hybridized literary style. This chapter explores some of Soma’s sources and influences from Indian literature and folklore, to Soviet realisms, and Anglophone modernisms. As Johannes Quack suggests in relation to his own work, the point of this approach is not to impose European values on Indian cultures, but to show how new formations of unbelief emerge at the point where different traditions intersect. In Soma, these formations often overlap with those seen in the British Rationalist context; the magazine gives priority to human values and flourishing over and above religious sensitivities and sanctions. But the magazine’s close affiliation with Eastern European and Indian sources and groups also produces new and distinctive formations. This chapter focuses on the parables and fables contributed by Bhat himself as exemplary of the magazine’s unique voice and contribution. Soma is a fitting place to end this book because, in both its conception and realization, the magazine extends the reach and the remit of what has thus far been considered under the heading of a literature of unbelief.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130076414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The conclusion describes the development of secularist publishing since the Second World War, noting significant points of intersection with debates over literature and free speech. It looks at the afterlife of the modernist secular-sacred compromise and shows how for some post-war writers and intellectuals faith found renewed purpose in fiction while unbelief did not. The conclusion revisits some of the rich fictional experiments seen in previous chapters to challenge the modernist idea still active in these contexts—that unbelief is necessarily monologic, unironic, and thereby fundamentally unliterary.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125942909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mary Butts and ‘Belief in Belief’ in Traps for Unbelievers and Supernatural Stories","authors":"S. Hobson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846471.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Mary Butts is an outlier among the writers discussed in this book because of her deep-felt religiosity and equally deep-felt scepticism towards modern expressions of unbelief. Yet, of all these figures, she was the most knowledgeable in the contemporary literature of unbelief and the only writer to mention ‘rationalist press stuff’ explicitly in a work of fiction. This chapter argues that Butts made her own contribution to this literature in the form of Traps for Unbelievers (1932), a study of the error made by modern unbelievers when they insist on ‘truth’ as the minimum requirement for belief. It then moves on to Butts’s own ‘strong’ understanding of belief in belief and examines the working out of this concept in novels and short supernatural stories from the late 1920s and 1930s. Butts suggests that a weakening in the human belief system left by the failure of Christianity needed to be compensated for by a strengthening elsewhere. This chapter argues she used her fiction as a testing ground for possible sources of new conviction and for the nature and degree of belief that could be borne by modern fiction and, by extension, the modern world at large.","PeriodicalId":119552,"journal":{"name":"Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133226891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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