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Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf
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.
1. Introduction-Desire Lines: The Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf -- 2. "Some restless searcher in me": Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Mysticism -- 3. A God "in process of change": Woolfian Theology and Mrs. Dalloway -- 4. "The thing is in itself enough": Virginia Woolf's Sacred Everyday -- 5. Virginia Woolf Reads "Dover Beach": Romance and the Victorian Crisis of Faith in To the Lighthouse -- 6. Woolf and Hopkins on the Revelatory Particular -- 7. "Perpetual Departure": Sacred Space and Urban Pilgrimage in Woolf's Essays -- 8. Quaker Mysticism and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse -- 9. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Dostoevsky: The Sacred Space of the Soul -- 10. "She heard the first words": Lesbian Subjectivity and Prophetic Discourse in Virginia Woolf's The Waves and Between the Acts -- 11. Sensibility, Parochiality, Spirituality: Toward a Critical Method and Ethic of Response in Woolf, Spivak, and Mahmood.