Spiritualism And Women S Writing

Using a wide range of unexplored archival material, this book examines the 'spectral' influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on women's writing, analyzing the ways in which modern writers have both subverted and mimicked nineteenth century sources in their evocation of the séance.

This original and imaginative study examines the influence of Victorian spiritualism and Psychical Research on a variety of modern and contemporary female authors. It explores both the material and ghostly connections between women's writing - particularly the work of Micḧle Roberts, A.S. Byatt, Victoria Glendinning and Sarah Waters - and the practice of mediumship in the nineteenth century. For the first time, it provides a sustained analysis of how and why the haunted world of Victorian spiritualism has been appropriated and reimagined in late twentieth-century fiction. In addition, it shows how many of the apparently unprecedented innovations of modernism are in fact already present in the rituals, performances and documents of the Victorian šance. Supported by compelling archival research throughout, the book not only demonstrates how a unique selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts are bound together by phantasmal ties but also shows how spiritualism forces us to reconsider our wider understanding of history, narrative and the afterlife.

Nineteenth-century American women’s culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women’s literature. The contributors examine fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs by professional authors, social activists, and women of faith, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. Embracing the complexities of lived religion in women’s culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential-Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political, or spiritual ends.

Concentrating on female modernists specifically, this volume examines spiritual issues and their connections to gender during the modernist period. Scholarly inquiry surrounding women writers and their relation to what Wassily Kandinsky famously hoped would be an ‘Epoch of the Great Spiritual’ has generated myriad contexts for closer analysis including: feminist theology, literary and religious history, psychoanalysis, queer and trauma theory. This book considers canonical authors such as Virginia Woolf while also attending to critically overlooked or poorly understood figures such as H.D., Mary Butts, Rose Macaulay, Evelyn Underhill, Christopher St. John and Dion Fortune. With wide-ranging topics such as the formally innovative poetry of Stevie Smith and Hope Mirrlees to Evelyn Underhill’s mystical treatises and correspondence, this collection of essays aims to grant voices to the mostly forgotten female voices of the modernist period, showing how spirituality played a vital role in their lives and writing.

A Buddhist nun goes AWOL to roam the French countryside and discovers a wild spirituality. A hellish trip through the mountains of Peru turns mystical and offers a vision. More than just adventure, the writing in A Woman's Path shares the unforgettable moments when a journey opens a traveler's eyes and profoundly alters who she is. Around the globe and across all religions, these tales of discovery offer an uncommon look at personal transformation, whether by the trials of stolen luggage and harrowing rides or the joys of seeking out extraordinary people, places, and experiences. Inspiring and insightful, this illustrated collection invites all women to step outside their everyday lives and welcome an awakening. Contributors include Anne Lamott, Maya Angelou, Linda Ellerbee, Kim Chernin, and Natalie Goldberg, among others.

Spiritual experience is a liberating source of women's identity and their resistance to oppression. This deeply moving collection of memoirs, stories, poetry, letters, prayers, and theologies is a source of empowering and uplifting thought for women in any time, at any age.

Women—religious and secular, medieval and modern—have always demonstrated their own unique approach to matters of the spirit. Limited in their public roles throughout much of history, women have been compelled to turn inward, developing rich interior lives in uniquely feminine ways. This anthology brings together women's writing from classic religious literature—Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu—as well as many passages of fiction and poetry that are truly undiscovered treasures of women's spirituality. With writers ranging from Helen Keller to Aung San Suu Kyi, from Agatha Christie and Ursula K. Le Guin to Rabi'a the Mystic and Hildegard of Bingen. Sarah Anderson's collection proves beyond a doubt that "the exploration of 'the hidden seas within' is a journey on which we can all embark."

Splendid, spiritual, and subversive, this anthology offers a sampler of just some of the feminisms emerging in academic seminars, street demonstrations for justice, and places where people are reclaiming their ancestral values. She Is Everywhere! Vol. 2 is comprised of international essays, poems, and works of art from the growing community of women and men who recognize Her and feel Her call to expression in many forms. This unique volume presents a fresh look at women in the Judeo-Christian Bible, in the Koran, and in the kaleidoscopic beauty of the world's women from her signs in caves, cliffs, and forests to her many faces, manifestations, and hidden places. Celebrate woman's spirituality, her colors, her islands and continents, her rages and blessings in weather, her silences, and her surprising epiphanies. She Is Everywhere! Vol. 2 leads the contemporary cultural and political nonviolent revolution for a radically democratic and harmonious world full of compassion, equality, and transformation!