2026 Theses Doctoral

An Orthodoxy of Sensibility: Conversion in British Literature, 1925-1965

Pedatella, Sophia L.

Examining the lives and work of T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and W.H. Auden, this dissertation shows how both the image of the English convert and the generic norms of ‘conversion literature’ transformed in the early twentieth century. While historically, conversion had been highly controversial in a narrowly English context, global social and political upheavals recast conversion as an attractive solution to the perceived decline of the Christian West.

This new understanding of conversion was enabled by a distinct phase of religious conservatism, spanning the 1907 encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis (which formalized the Church’s position against theological modernism) to the Second Vatican Council (which essentially reversed this stance). This bout of ecclesiastical anti-modernism is more or less contemporaneous with the long-modernist period in literature.

Characterized by the objectivity, austerity, and anti-individualism that its authors sought in the contemporary church, this corpus breaks from tradition in refusing the epiphanic individualism of traditional conversion narratives. Beyond offering the first focused biographical accounts of these authors’ conversions, this project also refines existing scholarship on religious belief in early twentieth-century literature. While this phase of literary history is typically associated with a rejection of orthodoxy, this dissertation recontextualizes ideals of hardness, stasis, and external authority within a specifically religious lens.