Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness

ISBN-13: 9781137530356 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 281 str.

Elizabeth Anderson; Andrew Radford; Heather Walton

Opis

This essay collection scrutinizes a diverse array of modernist Anglophone women writers and their engagements with religion and spirituality. Considering canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf alongside less studied writers such as H.D., Mary Butts, Rose Macaulay, Stevie Smith and Evelyn Underhill, the volume fills a real gap in scholarship on modernism, spirituality and religion.

Spis treści

Contents

 

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction: The Intricate Persistence of Strange Gods

Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford and Heather Walton

 

Chapter 1: Radical Unorthodoxy: Religious and Literary Modernisms in H.D. and Mary Butts

Suzanne Hobson        

 

Chapter 2: Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn Underhill, the Subliminal Consciousness and Spiritual Direction

Jamie Callison

 

Chapter 3: Stevie Smith’s serious play: a modernist reframing of Christian orthodoxy       

Gillian Boughton

 

Chapter 4: Faith in Ruins: Fragments and Pattern in the Late Works of Rose Macaulay

Heather Walton

 

Chapter 5: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Scholarship

Mimi Winick  

 

Chapter 6: Antiquarian Magic: Jane Harrison’s Ritual Theory and Hope Mirrlees’s Paris

Nina Enemark

 

Chapter 7: Childish Things: Spirituality, Materiality and Creativity in Mary Butts’s The Crystal Cabinet

Elizabeth Anderson

 

Chapter 8: Spectral Poetics in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Sheela Banerjee

 

Chapter 9: The Queer Movements of Ecstasy and Asceticism in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul and Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists

Ellen Ricketts 

 

Chapter 10: Dora Marsden and the “WORLD-INCLUSIVE I”: Egoism, Mysticism and Radical Feminism

Steven Quincey-Jones

 

Chapter 11: What lies below the horizon of life: the occult fiction of Dion Fortune

Andrew Radford       

 

Chapter 12: What Words Conceal: H.D.’s occult word-alchemy in the 1950s

Matte Robinson         

 

Afterword: Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality

Lara Vetter

 

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

O autorze

Elizabeth Anderson is Impact Research Fellow at the University of Stirling. She is the author of H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination and has published in Literature and Theology, Women: A Cultural Review and Christianity and Literature.

Andrew Radford is a Lecturer in Anglo-American Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has published extensively on modernist fiction and is the co-editor of Franco-British Cultural Exchanges: Channel Packets.

Heather Walton is Professor of Theology and Creative Practice and Co-Director of the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her books include: Literature, Theology and Feminism, Imagining Theology: Women Writing and God and Not Eden: Spiritual Life Writing for this World. She is Executive Editor of the journal Literature and Theology. 

Blurb

Concentrating on female modernists specifically, this volume examines spiritual issues and their connections to gender during the modernist period. Scholarly inquiry surrounding women writers and their relation to what Wassily Kandinsky famously hoped would be an ‘Epoch of the Great Spiritual’ has generated myriad contexts for closer analysis including: feminist theology, literary and religious history, psychoanalysis, queer and trauma theory. This book considers canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf while also attending to critically overlooked or poorly understood figures such as H.D., Mary Butts, Rose Macaulay, Evelyn Underhill, Christopher St. John and Dion Fortune. With wide-ranging topics such as the formally innovative poetry of Stevie Smith and Hope Mirrlees to Evelyn Underhill’s mystical treatises and correspondence, this collection of essays aims to grant voices to the mostly forgotten female voices of the modernist period, showing how spirituality played a vital role in their lives and writing.