As Berenice Martin observed in a review of a Pericles Lewis book, modernist novels had abandoned religious narratives but yet had “nostalgia for communal ritual and the wistful search for sacred ground”. They depicted the uncertain boundaries between sacred and profane “and experiences of sacred power or existential significance”, or ultimate meaning: “The novelists, unconstrained by positivist canons of ‘scientific’ methodology, groped for non-religious language in which to describe often equivocal experiences evoking the transcendental or ‘unseen’…”.

[from a TLS review of Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel].