Overview
- Brings to light several modernist women writers including Rose Macaulay, Evelyn Underhill, Christopher St. John and Dion Fortune
- Offers a diverse range of topics and approaches to spirituality such as Hellenistic fiction, ritual scholarship, antiquarianism and spectral poetics
- Highlights the important role of religion and spirituality during the modernist period, a topic that has been brushed over.
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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 avital role in their lives and writing.
Reviews
“A collection of breathtaking range and variety, this book includes provocative new readings among its original chapters which pore over, interrogate, and establish the fact that modernist women writers were genuinely invested in spiritual quests. Founded on an emerging, impressive body of new research (often archival), this book makes a fresh, original, and substantial contribution to the study of the topos of spirituality as understood and practiced by modernist women writers. I strongly recommend it.” (Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, Professor of English, University of New Brunswick, Canada)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality
Book Subtitle: A Piercing Darkness
Editors: Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, Heather Walton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-53035-6Published: 04 January 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-70849-9Published: 13 November 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-53036-3Published: 22 December 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 281
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations
Topics: Spirituality