LITERATURE AND FILM

Literature

The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 marked the effective end of the nineteenth century, and with it the age of the great religious novel in Europe and its reflection on the shifting experience of Christianity after the Enlightenment and in the age of industrialisation, not least as the churches expanded globally with the growth of the colonial powers. The terrible years of the war destabilised and eroded theology and belief, and if the young English poet Wilfred Owen had already lapsed from his Christian faith even by 1913, his experiences at the front provoked a rage against the faith and a despair, later to be finely caught in Benjamin Britten’s setting of his poetry to music in the War requiem (1961), that was to herald the new century. At the same time the anxious literature of avant-garde modernism, with its attack on realism and mimesis, emerged in sceptical protest against the ‘totalizing religious and political frame-works of the nineteenth century’. Stephen, in James Joyce’s Stephen hero (1904-6) is told by a priest that his essay on ‘Art and life’ ‘represents the sum of modern unrest and modern freethinking’. Twenty years later, E. M. Forster in A passage to India (1924) allows only a minor role for the European missionaries in Chandrapore, India, and their ‘poor, chattering Christianity’.