Bloomsbury Academic
Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing
Key Metrics
- Elizabeth Anderson
- Bloomsbury Academic
- Paperback
- 9781350243194
- -
- -
- Literary Criticism > Modern - 20th Century
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
Professor Elizabeth Anderson specializes in moral, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and the social sciences. She is particularly interested in exploring the interactions of social science with moral and political theory, how we learn to improve our value judgments, the epistemic functions of emotions and democratic deliberation, and issues of race, gender, and equality.
She is the author of Value in Ethics and Economics, The Imperative of Integration, and, most recently, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It), as well as articles on value theory, the ethical limitations of markets, facts and values in social scientific research, feminist and social epistemology, racial integration and affirmative action, rational choice and social norms, democratic theory, egalitarianism, and the history of ethics (focusing on Kant, Mill, and Dewey). Professor Anderson is currently working on a history of egalitarianism.
Professor Anderson is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She designed and was the first Director of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at UM.
- Education
- 1987, Ph.D., Philosophy, Harvard University
1984, A.M., Philosophy, Harvard University
1981, B.A., Philosophy with minor in Economics, High Honors, Swarthmore College
Source: University of Michigan
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