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Radical Unorthodoxy: Religious and Literary Modernisms in H.D. and Mary Butts

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Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality

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Abstract

This chapter examines H.D.’s and Mary Butts’s fictions of the ancient world against the background of the modernist crisis in the Catholic and Anglican Churches. The Hellenistic Age is contested ground in this quarrel, claimed by some as the eclipse of the Golden Age of Olympian religion and by others as the dawning of a new epoch of world Christianity. H.D. and Butts follow the example of George Moore and D.H. Lawrence, among others, in providing an account of this age that is also a thinly veiled account of their own times. This chapter asks how they work at the borderlines of orthodoxy and heresy in their stories and how, in particular, they approach the still vexed question of women’s place in Christianity.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Suzanne Hobson

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  1. Suzanne Hobson
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Correspondence to Suzanne Hobson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Stirling, Stirling, United Kingdom

    Elizabeth Anderson

  2. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Andrew Radford

  3. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Heather Walton

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Hobson, S. (2016). Radical Unorthodoxy: Religious and Literary Modernisms in H.D. and Mary Butts. In: Anderson, E., Radford, A., Walton, H. (eds) Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_2

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