Abstract
Conversion and apostasy are central to modern literature. The intense power of religious decision, whether to embrace or abandon religious faith, has profoundly shaped the imagination of some significant authors. With readings of the works of Leslie Stephen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Claude McKay, this project explores how changes of belief inform the central concerns, structure, and style of these writers. For each, their commitments to what John Henry Newman called “true philosophy,” weighing the alternatives between Catholicism or atheism, influenced aspects of their writings, from Leslie Stephen’s critical generosity, to Hopkins’ paradoxical imagery, to the recursive structure that envelops the vast diversity of Finnegans Wake, to Claude McKay’s perpetual untimeliness and his valorization of transformation.