Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture

Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture PDF Author: Jane de Gay
Publisher: EUP
ISBN: 9781474454889
Category : Christianity in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This wide-ranging study demonstrates that Woolf, despite her agnostic upbringing, was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity as a faith and a socio-political movement. Jane de Gay provides a strongly contextual approach, first revealing the extent of the Christian influences on Woolf's upbringing, including an analysis of the far-reaching influence of the Clapham Sect, and then drawing attention to the importance of Christianity among Woolf's friends and associates. It shows that Woolf's awareness of the ongoing influence of Christian ideas and institutions informed her feminist critique of society in Three Guineas. The book sheds new light on works including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves by revealing her fascination with the clergy, the Madonna, churches and cathedrals; her interest in the Bible as artefact and literary text; and her wrestling with questions about salvation and the nature of God.

Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture

Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture PDF Author: Jane de Gay
Publisher: EUP
ISBN: 9781474454889
Category : Christianity in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wide-ranging study demonstrates that Woolf, despite her agnostic upbringing, was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity as a faith and a socio-political movement. Jane de Gay provides a strongly contextual approach, first revealing the extent of the Christian influences on Woolf's upbringing, including an analysis of the far-reaching influence of the Clapham Sect, and then drawing attention to the importance of Christianity among Woolf's friends and associates. It shows that Woolf's awareness of the ongoing influence of Christian ideas and institutions informed her feminist critique of society in Three Guineas. The book sheds new light on works including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves by revealing her fascination with the clergy, the Madonna, churches and cathedrals; her interest in the Bible as artefact and literary text; and her wrestling with questions about salvation and the nature of God.

Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture

Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture PDF Author: Jane De Gay
Publisher: EUP
ISBN: 9781474415637
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
There is growing critical interest in the connections between literature and Christianity, but Virginia Woolf's work has so far attracted little attention because of her agnostic upbringing and her famous statement that 'certainly and emphatically there is no god.' This study fills a gap by revealing that Woolf was profoundly interested in, and knowledgeable about, Christianity even though she was not convinced by it. The book sheds new light on her work by examining her allusions to Christian ideas, art, architecture and literature. The book takes a strongly contextual approach, first revealing the extent of the Christian influences on Woolf's upbringing, including an analysis of the far-reaching and multi-dimensional influence of the Clapham Sect, and then drawing attention to the continuing influence of Christianity on modernism and within Woolf's circle. It shows that Woolf's feminist criticism draws on a highly-informed critique of religious ideas about gender and that her explorations of the 'mystic' and 'spiritual' engage with theological debates about sacred space, time and eternity, the soul, salvation and deity.

Religion Around Virginia Woolf

Religion Around Virginia Woolf PDF Author: Stephanie Paulsell
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271086262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf was not a religious person in any traditional sense, yet she lived and worked in an environment rich with religious thought, imagination, and debate. From her agnostic parents to her evangelical grandparents, an aunt who was a Quaker theologian, and her friendship with T. S. Eliot, Woolf’s personal circle was filled with atheists, agnostics, religious scholars, and Christian converts. In this book, Stephanie Paulsell considers how the religious milieu that Woolf inhabited shaped her writing in unexpected and innovative ways. Beginning with the religious forms and ideas that Woolf encountered in her family, friendships, travels, and reading, Paulsell explores the religious contexts of Woolf’s life. She shows that Woolf engaged with religion in many ways, by studying, reading, talking and debating, following controversies, and thinking about the relationship between religion and her own work. Paulsell examines the ideas about God that hover around Woolf’s writings and in the minds of her characters. She also considers how Woolf, drawing from religious language and themes in her novels and in her reflections on the practices of reading and writing, created a literature that did, and continues to do, a particular kind of religious work. A thought-provoking contribution to the literature on Woolf and religion, this book highlights Woolf’s relevance to our post-secular age. In addition to fans of Woolf, scholars and general readers interested in religious and literary studies will especially enjoy Paulsell’s well-researched narrative.

Virginia Woolf and Heritage

Virginia Woolf and Heritage PDF Author: Jane De Gay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1942954425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf was deeply interested in the past - whether literary, intellectual, cultural, political or social - and her writings interrogate it repeatedly. She was also a great tourist and explorer of heritage sites in England and abroad. This book brings together an international team ofworld-class scholars to explore how Woolf engaged with heritage, how she understood and represented it, and how she has been represented by the heritage industry.

Modernism After the Death of God

Modernism After the Death of God PDF Author: Stephen Kern
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351603175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf

Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf PDF Author: Kristina K. Groover
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030325687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf offers an expansive interdisciplinary study of spirituality in Virginia Woolf's writing, drawing on theology, psychology, geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other critical fields. The essays in this collection interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual, and to Woolf’s work, while contributing to a larger critical reappraisal of modernism, religion, and secularism. While Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become critical commonplaces, her sometimes withering critique of religion conflicts with what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. The essays collected here take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life's meaning in light of her disparaging attitude toward religion. These essays argue that Woolf's writing reframes and reclaims the spiritual in alternate forms; she strives to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain after the death of God has been pronounced.

Art, Imagination and Christian Hope

Art, Imagination and Christian Hope PDF Author: Trevor A. Hart
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754666769
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In Christian faith, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of hopeful and expectant living. In art, the poetic interplay between past, present and future takes specific concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an imaginative ecology of hope.This volume attends to the contributions that architecture, drama, literature, music and painting can make, as artists trace patterns of promise, resisting the finality of modernity's despairing visions and generating hopeful living in a present which, although marked by sin and death, is grasped imaginatively as already pregnant with future.

A Skeptic's Guide to Faith

A Skeptic's Guide to Faith PDF Author: Philip Yancey
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310325021
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Examines the apparent contradictions in the world and explains how the invisible, natural, and supernatural worlds might interact and affect people's daily lives.

Religion Around Bono

Religion Around Bono PDF Author: Chad E. Seales
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271086270
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
For many, U2’s Bono is an icon of both evangelical spirituality and secular moral activism. In this book, Chad E. Seales examines the religious and spiritual culture that has built up around the rock star over the course of his career and considers how Bono engages with that religion in his music and in his activism. Looking at Bono and his work within a wider critique of white American evangelicalism, Seales traces Bono’s career, from his background in religious groups in the 1970s to his rise to stardom in the 1980s and his relationship with political and economic figures, such as Jeffrey Sachs, Bill Clinton, and Jesse Helms. In doing so, Seales shows us a different Bono, one who uses the spiritual meaning of church tradition to advocate for the promise that free markets and for-profits will bring justice and freedom to the world’s poor. Engaging with scholarship in popular culture, music, religious studies, race, and economic development, Seales makes the compelling case that neoliberal capitalism is a religion and that Bono is its best-known celebrity revivalist. Engagingly written and bitingly critical, Religion Around Bono promises to transform our understanding of the rock star’s career and advocacy. Those interested in the intersection of rock music, religion, and activism will find Seales’s study provocative and enlightening.

Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision

Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision PDF Author: Nadra Nittle
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506471528
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
When Toni Morrison died in August 2019, she was widely remembered for her contributions to literature as an African American woman, an identity she wore proudly. Morrison was clear that she wrote from a Black, female perspective and for others who shared her identity. But just as much as she was an African American writer, Toni Morrison was a woman of faith. Morrison filled her novels with biblical allusions, magic, folktales, and liberated women, largely because Christianity, African American folk magic, and powerful women defined her own life. She grew up with family members who could interpret dreams, predict the future, see ghosts, and go about their business. Her relatives, particularly her mother, were good storytellers, and her family's oral tradition included ghost stories and African American folktales. But her family was also Christian. As a child, Morrison converted to Catholicism and chose a baptismal name that truly became her own--Anthony, from St. Anthony of Padua--going from Chloe to Toni. Morrison embraced both Catholicism and the occult as a child and, later, as a writer. She was deeply religious, and her spirituality included the Bible, the paranormal, and the folktales she heard as a child. Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks this oft-ignored, but essential, element of Toni Morrison's work--her religion--and in so doing, gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. In its pages, Nadra Nittle remembers and understands Morrison for all of who she was: a writer, a Black woman, and a person of complex faith. As Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals, to fully understand the writing of Toni Morrison one must also understand the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.