Abstract
Outlining an alternative trajectory for modernist spirituality to that traced in Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010), I argue that modernist religious thought, far from playing heir to the long march of secularization, was in fact conditioned by a late-nineteenth-century cultural crisis that issued in a range of religious experiments and renewals, one of which was Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911), a text that not only brought together mystical traditions and scientific discoveries, but also used this interdisciplinary remit to counter existing secularizing perspectives. An important dimension of Underhill’s work was its collaborative nature; it offers, I argue, not access to rarefied enlightenment, but rather a bold attempt to navigate a treacherous religious landscape.
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Callison, J. (2016). Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn Underhill, the Subliminal Consciousness and Spiritual Direction. 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_3
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