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Mystic Moderns
Agency and Enchantment in Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, and Mary Webb
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2020
Summary
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.”
Working as they did within the shadow of the First World War, Underhill, Sinclair, and Webb were, in the end, attempting to determine what might be of authentic value for a modern age marked by ubiquitous death. While not themselves utopian authors, each was touched by her era’s complicated hunger for the best of all possible worlds. Their constructions of how an individual should be and act in the midst of modernity thus simultaneously projected visions of what that modernity itself should become.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2020
ISBN-Print
978-1-4985-8377-0
ISBN-Online
978-1-4985-8378-7
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
293
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Introduction No access
Chapter One: Considering the New No access Pages 1 - 14
Chapter Two: Mystic Modes No access
Chapter Three: Catholic Aesthetics and Medieval Modernity No access
Chapter Four: Magics and Mysticisms No access
Chapter Five: The Heroic Individual on the Mystic Way No access
Chapter Six: Gender, Class, and Mysticism No access
Chapter Seven: Language and the Lure of Idealism No access
Chapter Eight: Deepest Desires No access
Chapter Nine: Maintaining Control No access
Chapter Ten: Evolution’s Promise No access
Chapter Eleven: Modernity, War, and Death No access
