Conclusion

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.