Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality A Piercing Darkness [Hardcover]

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 Underhills 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.

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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.

Contents

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction: The Intricate Persistence of Strange Gods

Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford and Heather Walton

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

Suzanne Hobson????????

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Chapter 2: Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn l,