Spiritual Responses to American Literary Modernism

This collection addresses the gap in American critical history regarding the role of spiritual discourse in literary modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. No book-length research has yet been published about spirituality and American Literary Modernism, with the exception of a few books on individual authors. The majority of the primary and critical material this book examines has been either rarely or incompletely considered from this angle. The volume highlights those American writers and texts who insisted on the spiritual relevance of literature, despite the growing secularity of literary modernism, bringing together a range of scholars to inspire both professors and students of American literature to look again and reconsider the spiritual discourse represented in the literature between the World Wars.

Windy Counsell Petrie is Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, USA. Her monograph, Templates for Authorship: American Women's Literary Autobiography of the 1930s was published in 2021. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in a/b: Autobiography Studies, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Christianity and Literature, American Writers, American Writers in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan), Modernist Women Writers and American Social Engagement (2019), Teaching Edith Wharton's Novels and Short Fiction (Palgrave MacMillan), and American Writers in Paris: Then and Now (forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan).