ABSTRACT
The previous chapters identified the modernist epiphany as a literary trope informed by several sources of inspiration: an existential quest for meaning and fullness, a phenomenological pursuit of lived experience beyond ordinary assumptions, and an interest in the psychological structures that make both possible. These recurring ingredients emerge as some of many aesthetic connections between the authors considered here, suggesting that a burgeoning modernist movement inspired by a transnational culture existed already in the early decades of the 20th century. Epiphanies indeed allow these authors to re-codify transcendence in their stories through the cultural coordinates of 20th-century modernity and propose its experience as a way to a fuller knowledge of reality, broad and deep enough to encompass opposite possibilities. The resulting intensity and radical ambiguity of these moments respond to the modernist quest for the essence of life with a positive discovery of its inexhaustible creative potential, providing a literary elaboration of the vitalist philosophies of the age. Epiphanies thus highlight an often underplayed, life-affirming but not naïve vein of modernist inspiration.
