Chapter 4 - Religion’s Configurations

Summary

This essay argues that the association of secularism and modernity has obscured the transnational importance of religion in the new modernist studies. It reviews recent studies of religion in selected modernist writers, but argues for more interdisciplinary methodologies, including religious studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative studies. After mapping key debates about religion, it pairs comparative readings of religion and anti-colonialism in Tagore’s Gora and Forster’s A Passage to India, and in Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years: Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist and H.D.’s The Flowering of the Rod, centered on unveiling. Whether spiritually or politically oriented, all envision forms of religious cosmopolitanism.