Dean of Yale College and Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature
In God's Afterlife: Religious Experience in the Modernist Novel, Professor Lewis continues to pursue his interest in the cultural climate of modernism and its impact on literary forms. The modernist period witnessed attempts by sociologists, psychologists, and historians of religion to explain religious experience in non-religious terms.
Professor Lewis wrote a chapter "Modernism and Religion" for The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, second edition, ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007) is intended for an audience of undergraduates and general readers. It gives an introduction to European and English literature of the early twentieth century.
Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2000; now available in paperback and Ebook editions) shows how novelists in England, Ireland, France, and Italy attempted through their experiments with the status of the omniscient narrator to respond to a crisis of faith in the liberal idea of the nation-state.