Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb

Mystic Moderns: Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb

Thrall, James H.

Hardcover

Literary CriticismReligion General

ISBN10: 1498583776
ISBN13: 9781498583770
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: Jan 21 2020
Pages: 314
Weight: 1.30
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Mystic Moderns examines the responses of three British authors--Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), May Sinclair (1863-1946), and Mary Webb (1881-1927)--to the emerging modernity of the long early twentieth-century moment encompassing the First World War. As they explored divergent but overlapping understandings of what mystical experience might be, these authors rejected claims that modernity's celebration of the secular and rational left no place for the mystical; rather, they countered, sensitivity to a greater reality could both establish and validate personal agency, and was integral to their identities as modern women. Their preoccupations with the dynamism of human connection drew on prevailing ideas of vital energy or life force developed by Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson in ways that channeled modernity's erotic energy of change. By using their fiction to describe new, self-authenticating forms of mysticism separate from either the prevailing orthodoxy of establishment Christianity or the extreme heterodoxy of their era's enthusiasm for paranormal experimentation, they also contributed to the rise of a generic concept of spirituality. Mystic Moderns thus offers historical perspective on contemporary claims for self-constructed, non-institutional spiritual experience associated with the claim I'm spiritual, not religious.

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