Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature – serie

The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction proposes an insight into the ways in which Virginia Woolf engaged with the questions of how class influences working women’s occupation of private and public space and how material privilege or economic distress inhibits or encourages their likelihood of obtaining their intellectual, spiritual, and physical desires. This groundbreaking book uses class as the determining factor to assess how servants and working class women occupy private and public space and articulate or fail to realize their desires. Drawing upon published and unpublished holograph and typescript drafts of the shorter fiction in The Monks House Papers as well as the Berg Collection, this book examines Woolf’s oscillating patterns of elision, idealization, and contempt for the voices and desires of female servants, lesbians, gypsies, and other disenfranchised women. The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction also assesses how the portrayal of working class women in the shorter fiction becomes a vital template for the representation of working class women in Woolf’s novels and essays. This study of the cumulative portrayal of the working class woman in all of Virginia Woolf’s shorter fiction will also be compelling for anyone interested in social justice, especially for advocates of equality in gender/race/class/sexuality conflicts.

This book is an analysis of the social and political outlook of D.H. Lawrence as determined by the development and conflict of the social forces of his time. It discusses, specifically, the relationship between Lawrence’s ideas, as an essayist and novelist, and the ruling ideology of imperialism, reaching the conclusion that Lawrence refused to face and oppose capitalist reality. He either escaped into an imaginary, anarchic utopia, or, more frequently, «criticized» capitalist relationships from the standpoint of a fascist, militaristic division into rulers and mob, aristocrats and plebeians. Lawrence’s letters during the First World War provide the documents that reveal the genesis of his fascist outlook. The book also traces Lawrence’s attitude towards socialism throughout his literary career and concludes that anti-socialism, with varying intensity, remained an essential part of his outlook. Certain assumptions, like a contempt for man as a social being and the existential division of human beings into higher and lower creatures – into the «average» and the «exceptional» – that were basic to his outlook, are shown to be the determining factors in the writing of Lawrence’s novels. The book ends with an analysis of the historical roots of the reactionary intelligentsia and discusses Lawrence’s relationships with the various cultural and ideological trends of his time, dealing also with the different tactics used by the critics to hide the true nature of his political ideas.

C. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the most original and well-known literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh rereading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms. The Feminine Ethos in C. S. Lewis’s ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ proposes that Lewis’s highly nuanced metaphorical view of gender relations has been misunderstood precisely because it challenges Western chauvinist assumptions on sex and gender. Instead of perpetuating sexism, Lewis subverts the culturally inherited chauvinism of «masculine» classical heroism with the biblically inspired vision of a surprisingly «feminine» spiritual heroism. His view that we are all «feminine» in relation to the «masculine» God – a theological feminism that crosses gender lines – means that qualities we tend to consider to be feminine, such as humility, are the qualities essential to being fully human. This book’s theoretical framework is Lewis’s own, grounded in his view of biblical thinking, as he was informed by writers such as Milton, Wordsworth, and George MacDonald, and in terms of the uniquely progressive implications for twentieth-first century cultural studies. This highly insightful and entertaining study of theological feminism in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia will be compelling for anyone interested in children’s and fantasy literature, Inklings scholarship, gender discourse, ethical and spiritual discourse, literature and theology, and cultural studies in general.

C. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the most original and well-known literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh rereading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms. The Gender Dance: Ironic Subversion in C. S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, the second volume in a triad, proposes that Lewis’s highly nuanced metaphorical view of gender relations has been misunderstood precisely because it challenges Western chauvinist assumptions on sex and gender. Instead of perpetuating sexism, Lewis subverts the culturally inherited chauvinism of «masculine» classical heroism with the biblically inspired vision of a surprisingly «feminine» spiritual heroism. His view that we are all «feminine» in relation to the «masculine» God – a theological feminism which crosses gender lines – means that qualities we tend to gender as feminine, such as humility, are the qualities essential to being fully human. The study’s theoretical framework is Lewis’s own, grounded in his view of biblical thinking, and as he was informed by writers such as Milton, Wordsworth, and George MacDonald, and in terms of the uniquely progressive implications for twentieth-first-century cultural studies. This highly insightful and entertaining study of theological feminism in Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy will be compelling for anyone interested in fantasy literature, Inklings scholarship, gender discourse, ethical and spiritual discourse, literature and theology, and cultural studies in general.

C. S. Lewis, fantasy novelist, literary scholar, and Christian apologist, is one of the best-known and most original literary figures of the twentieth century. As one who stood at the crossroads of Edwardian and modern thinking, he is often read as a sexist or even misogynistic man of his time, but this fresh reading assesses Lewis as a prescient thinker who transformed typical Western gender paradigms. Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C. S. Lewis and Gender proposes that Lewis’s highly nuanced metaphorical view of gender relations has been misunderstood precisely because it challenges Western chauvinist assumptions of sex and gender. Instead of perpetuating sexism, Lewis subverts the culturally inherited chauvinism of «masculine» classical heroism with the biblically inspired vision of a surprisingly «feminine» spiritual heroism. His view that we are all «feminine» in relation to the «masculine» God – a theological feminism that crosses gender lines – means that qualities we tend to gender as feminine, such as humility, are the qualities essential to being fully human. This book’s theoretical framework is Lewis’s own, grounded in his view of biblical thinking and informed by the thinking of writers such as Milton, Wordsworth, and George MacDonald; thus it has uniquely progressive implications for twenty-first-century cultural studies. This highly insightful and entertaining study of theological feminism in Lewis’s life’s work, from Dymer and The Pilgrim’s Regress, to The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces, will be compelling for anyone interested in fantasy literature, Inklings scholarship, gender discourse, ethical and spiritual discourse, the interplay of literature and theology, and cultural studies.

This iconoclastic study compares the lives and works of Virginia Woolf and her Quaker aunt, Caroline Stephen, to suggest that Woolf was more deeply influenced by a sense of mysticism than she was by her father’s atheism. Anyone interested in Woolf, Quaker studies, British Modernism, Christianity, and women’s studies would find much here to challenge assumptions.