Download or read book Spiritualism and Women s Writing written by T. Kontou and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-08-26 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Spiritualism and Women s Writing written by Tatiana Kontou and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Wise Women written by Susan Cahill and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1997 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Material Spirituality in Modernist Women s Writing written by Elizabeth Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Woman s Path written by Lucy McCauley and published by Travelers' Tales. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Eroticism Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women s Writings written by Donna Aza Weir-Soley and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Provocative . . . articulates the importance of embodied, erotic spirituality to black female subjectivity and empowerment."--Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature "Sets out to reclaim the right of black women to their sexual and erotic expression untainted by the stereotypes and disparagements that have historically confined them."--African American Review "Captures one of the most challenging concerns of scholars who engage black women's literature, culture, and theory: the ongoing quest to locate a form of black female sexual agency that neither withers in the chilly lake of sexual repression nor explodes in the heat of hypersexual stereotypes."--MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States "Successfully undertakes an analysis of how black women writers have used overlapping narrative depictions of sexuality and spirituality to recast the denigrated black female body and rewrite an empowered and fully actualized black female subject."--Candice M. Jenkins, author of Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy "Weir-Soley speaks with an authority that comes from real knowledge of, investment in, and attention to the details of the African cosmologies and textual complexities she unearths."--Carine Mardorossian, SUNY-Buffalo "The most original and significant contributions are the often brilliant readings of Morrison, Adisa, and Danticat. The work is riveting, both methodologically and critically."--Leslie Sanders, York University Western European mythology and history tend to view spirituality and sexuality as opposite extremes. But sex can be more than a function of the body and religion more than a function of the mind, as exemplified in the works and characters of such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat. Donna Weir-Soley builds on the work of previous scholars who have identified the ways that black women's narratives often contain a form of spirituality rooted in African cosmology, which consistently grounds their characters' self-empowerment and quest for autonomy. What she adds to the discussion is an emphasis on the importance of sexuality in the development of black female subjectivity, beginning with Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and continuing into contemporary black women's writings. Writing in a clear, lucid, and straightforward style, Weir-Soley supports her thesis with close readings of various texts, including Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Morrison's Beloved. She reveals how these writers highlight the interplay between the spiritual and the sexual through religious symbols found in Voudoun, Santeria, Condomble, Kumina, and Hoodoo. Her arguments are particularly persuasive in proposing an alternative model for black female subjectivity.
Download or read book Diving Deep Surfacing written by Carol P. Christ and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diving Deep and Surfacing reveals how the writings of Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich, and Ntozake Shange can inform women's search for spiritual renewal. A new afterword testifies to the importance of spiritual autobiography for women.
Download or read book Waking the Witch written by Pam Grossman and published by Gallery Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the podcast host of The Witch Wave and practicing witch Pam Grossman—who Vulture has dubbed the “Terry Gross of witches”—comes an exploration of the world’s fascination with witches, why they have intrigued us for centuries and why they’re more relevant now than ever. When you think of a witch, what do you picture? Pointy black hat, maybe a broomstick. But witches in various guises have been with us for millennia. In Waking the Witch, Pam Grossman explores the impact of the world’s most magical icon. From the idea of the femme fatale in league with the devil to the bewitching pop culture archetypes in Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Harry Potter; from the spooky ladies in fairy tales to the rise of contemporary witchcraft, witches reflect the power and potential of women. Part cultural analysis, part memoir, Waking the Witch traces the author’s own journey on the path to witchcraft, and how this has helped her find self-empowerment and purpose. It celebrates witches past, present, and future, and reveals the critical role they have played—and will continue to play—in the world as we know it. “Deftly illuminating the past while beckoning us towards the future, Waking the Witch has all the makings of a feminist classic. Wise, relatable, and real, Pam Grossman is the witch we need for our times” (Ami McKay, author of The Witches of New York).
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Spiritual Vision written by Nadra Nittle and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks an oft-ignored but essential element of her work--her religion--and in so doing gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. Nadra Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.
Download or read book Writing Religious Women written by Christiania Whitehead and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of commissioned essays explores women's vernacular theology through a wide range of medieval prose and verse texts, from saints' lives to visionary literature. Employing a historicist methodology, the essays are sited at the intersection of two discursive fields: female spiritual practice and female textual practice. The contributors are primarily interested in the relation of women to religious books, as writers, receivers, and as objects of representation. They focus on historical approaches to the question of women's spirituality, and generically unrestricted examinations of issues of female literacy, book ownership, and reading practice. The essays are grouped under four main themes: the influence of anchoritic spirituality upon later lay piety, Carthusian links with female spirituality, the representation of femininity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English religious poetry, and veneration, performance and delusion in the Book of Margery Kempe.
Download or read book Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality written by Elizabeth Anderson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-22 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Wilderness Within written by Kristina K. Groover and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's literature is notably marked by a preoccupation with the spiritual quest. Questing heroes from Huck Finn to Nick Adams have undertaken solitary journeys that pull them away from family and society and into a transformative wilderness that brings them to a new understanding of the spiritual world. Women, however, have not often been portrayed as questing heroes. Bound to home and community, they have been more frequently cast as representatives of that stifling world from which the hero is compelled to flee. Are women in American literary texts thus excluded from spiritual experience? Kristina K. Groover, in examining this question, finds that books by American women writers offer alternative patterns for seeking revelation--patterns which emphasize not solitary journeys, but the sacredness of everyday life. Drawing on the work of feminist theorists and theologians, including Carol Gilligan, Naomi Goldenberg, and Rosemary Ruether, Groover explores the spiritual nature and force of domesticity, community, storytelling, and the garden in the works of such writers as Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter, Kaye Gibbons, and Alice Walker. Ordinary, personal experience in these works becomes a source for spiritual revelation. Wisdom is gained, lessons are learned, and lives are healed not in spite of home and communal ties, but because of them. Thus, American women writers, Groover argues, make alternative literary and spiritual paradigms possible. Similarly, Kristina K. Groover, in this lucid and groundbreaking work, opens up new fields of exploration for any reader interested in women's spirituality or in the rich, diverse field of American literature.
Download or read book Reclaiming Myths of Power written by Ruth Y. Jenkins and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book re-examines the Victorian spiritual crisis from the perspective of the period's women writers, exploring the spiritual dimension in their lives and narratives. The introduction considers the relationship between sacred and secular canons and the limited access women have had to both. In the following chapters, case studies of the lives and selected texts of Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between female spiritual crises and diverse narrative strategies that reappropriate the conservative power associated with religious symbolism for a radical revisioning of women's social subjection." "By analyzing the neglected spiritual crises these women experienced, their discourse, and that produced by other Victorian women, this study reveals a more complex, problematic, and polemical dialogue during the period than has previously been argued."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book African Spirituality in Black Women s Fiction written by Elizabeth J. West and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-12 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers. Beginning with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction traces applications and transformations of African spirituality in black women's writings that culminate in the conscious and deliberate celebration of Africanity in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The journey from Wheatley's veiled remembrances to Hurston's explicit gaze of continental Africa represents the literary journey of black women writers to represent Africa as not only a very real creative resource but also a liberating one. Hurston's icon of black female autonomy and self realization is woven from the thread work of African spiritual principles that date back to early black women's writings.
Download or read book Heaven s Face Thinly veiled written by Sarah Anderson and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1998-03-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book Things of the Spirit written by Kristina K. Groover and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen feminist-focused essays on women's spirituality provide important insights into the nature of the sacred as seen over many years through the female consciousness.
Download or read book The Lives of the Heart written by Jane Hirshfield and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 1997 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jane Hirshfield, the award-winning author of THE OCTOBER PALACE and editor of WOMEN IN PRAISE OF THE SACRED, presents a scintillating new volume of poems to be published to coincide with the hardcover release of NINE GATES, the author's primer on the reading and writing of poetry.
