Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing - by Elizabeth Anderson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For Virginia Woolf, H.D., Mary Butts and Gwendolyn Brooks, things mobilise creativity, traverse domestic, public and rural spaces and stage the interaction between the sublime and the mundane. Ordinary things are rendered extraordinary by their spiritual or emotional significance, and yet their very ordinariness remains part of their value.

This book addresses the intersection of spirituality, things and places - both natural and built environments - in the work of these four women modernists. From the living pebbles in Mary Butts's memoir to the pencil sought in Woolf's urban pilgrimage in 'Street Haunting', the Christmas decorations crafted by children in H.D.'s autobiographical novel The Gift and Maud Martha's love of dandelions in Brooks's only novel, things indicate spiritual concerns in these writers' work.

Elizabeth Anderson contributes to current debates around materiality, vitalism and post-secularism, attending to both mainstream and heterodox spiritual expressions and connections between the two in modernism. How we value our spaces and our world being one of the most pressing contemporary ethical and ecological concerns, this volume contributes to the debate by arguing that a change in our attitude towards the environment will not come from a theory of renunciation but through attachment to and regard for material things.

Review Quotes

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

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).