Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter One Threads and Silver Paper: spirituality of gift and process in H.D.’s war writing Chapter Two ‘The Pebbles Were Each One Alive’: Animism and Anglo-Catholicism in Mary Butts’s writing Chapter Three Darkness and Dirt: Virginia Woolf’s material mysticism Chapter Four Radiant Dandelions: Gwendolyn Brooks’s domestic sublime Chapter Five Things in the City Notes Bibliography

Promotional Information

An analysis of the spiritual resonances of things, materials and environments and their relationships to creativity and subjectivity in the work of four modernist women writers: Mary Butts, Virginia Woolf, H.D. and Gwendolyn Brooks.

About the Author

Elizabeth Anderson is Lecturer of English Studies at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She is the author of H. D. and Modernist Religious Imagination (2013) and the co-editor of Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness (2016).

Reviews

Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing offers a fascinating new approach to the ‘liveliness of things’ in modernist women’s writing. Steering away from the tendency to see objects purely as commodities and women as consumers, Anderson reveals the mystery and wonder that inheres in their alterity and argues that we should read these characteristics as a form of spirituality that bridges the gap between the material and the transcendental, body and soul. Everyday objects come to seem animate, mobile, relational and obdurate—things that are worthy of the attention and care they receive in this book. Material Spirituality is an excellent introduction to the hybrid forms of religosity seen in its subjects and as an original and timely intervention into the study of literary cultures and religion in a secular age.
*Dr Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London, UK*

From an established scholar of modernism and religion, Material Spirituality productively weds feminist theories of theology and contemporary thinking about the vibrancy and agentive capacities of matter. In her new study of the prose of both well-known and critically neglected twentieth-century women writers, Anderson uncovers a surprising and utterly fascinating view of spirituality as bounded by, and grounded in, the quotidian.
*Lara Vetter, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte*