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Praying Kin: Christina Rossetti and the Unity of Things

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Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930

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Abstract

“Praying Kin” argues that Donna Haraway’s call to “make kin” is anticipated by Christina Rossetti’s focus on prayerfulness as the spiritual basis of creation’s interdependence. With reference to her reading of Revelation, The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892), and poetic setting of the Benedicite prayer, “‘All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord’: A Processional of Creation” (1881), the chapter suggests that Rossetti developed a model of how to prayerfully read and relate to creation. This chapter explores how such prayerfulness constituted both a spiritual preparation for the new time to come and an ecological politics in which the human could no longer assert its dominance over the other-than-human.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gregory of Nyssa, De anima et resurrectione, quoted in Stramara (1998, 261).

  2. 2.

    See Mason (2020).

  3. 3.

    “We cannot try to be meek or gentle in order to become a disciple of this gentle Jesus, but in learning to be his disciple some of us will discover that we have been gentled” (Hauerwas 2010, 39).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Emma Mason

Authors
  1. Emma Mason
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Correspondence to Emma Mason .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, County College, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Jo Carruthers

  2. Arab Open University, Ardiya, Kuwait

    Nour Dakkak

  3. Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, County College, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Rebecca Spence

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Mason, E. (2019). Praying Kin: Christina Rossetti and the Unity of Things. In: Carruthers, J., Dakkak, N., Spence, R. (eds) Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_10

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