Conclusion

Abstract

British writers at mid-century drew upon religious, more specifically Christian, material as resources for poetry, radio broadcasts, and fiction. This religious material was used as a counterweight to conceptions of states and statehood—communities that were spiritually and organically formed, rather than mandated by the welfare state. Representations of religious phenomena answer the existential question that haunted the mid-century: ‘what is a man?’ The conclusion briefly examines the representation of nuns in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them and Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, before signing off with some speculations about the more sketchy and vedantic ideas about spirituality that took hold in the 1960s.