The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion

Explores Virginia Woolf’s engagements with a broad range of religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Quakerism.

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion makes exciting interventions into debates about the beliefs and spiritual commitments of one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Although critics and readers have often assumed that Virginia Woolf is hostile or indifferent to religion, her work is, in fact, from early to late, traversed with reflections about religious, spiritual and sacred meaning and experience. Featuring twenty-eight new essays by established and emerging scholars, this Companion is the first to consider Woolf’s perspectives on global religious traditions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Quakerism within the context of literary and cultural modernisms. The volume draws on a diverse range of theoretical and critical methods to showcase the multi-layered complexities of Woolf’s approaches to the sacred. Together the contributors provide a thorough re-assessment of the assumption that Woolf was an atheist and illuminate insights about her work in relation to twenty-first century critical discourse about religion, ethics, spirituality and mysticism while giving new attention to feminist perspectives, queer desire, sacred ecologies and narrative poetics.