Introduction: the intricate persistence of strange Gods

Anderson, E., Radford, A. and Walton, H. (2016) Introduction: the intricate persistence of strange Gods. In: Anderson, E., Radford, A. and Walton, H. (eds.) Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness. Palgrave Macmillan: London, pp. 1-20. ISBN 9781137530356 (doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_1)

Abstract

Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Montaigne”, represents the “soul” as “all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action” (Woolf 1929, 56). Attempts by Woolf and other female authors to map the “soul” as the essence of being reveal dynamic tensions between mainstream institutional religion and women’s felt sensation, so throwing into relief critically overlooked intersections of sexual difference, cultural creativity and mystical perception. Hope Mirrlees, whose experimental poem Paris (1920) was published as a slim booklet by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, scrutinizes these correspondences through the lens of Jane Ellen Harrison’s feminist classicism. This act had potentially crucial implications for the women’s movement at a time that many feminist public intellectuals interpreted as a new Hellenistic Age when numerous orthodoxies (as well as heresies and heterodoxies) were subject to flux (see Koulouris 2013).

• Item Type: Book Sections (Introduction)
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Walton, Professor Heather and Radford, Dr Andrew
• Authors: Anderson, E., Radford, A., and Walton, H.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature; College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > Theology and Religious Studies
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• ISBN: 9781137530356