Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing - (New Directions in Religion and Literature) by Elizabeth Ludlow (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In the 19th century, an era that saw a reconfiguration of the relationship between the self, the world and the divine, women writers probed the theological depths of embodied faith in new ways through poetry, fiction, devotional prose and life writing.

Elizabeth Ludlow explores how, through this process, they articulated what it means to pray, and thereby understand one's place in a world of individual and communal bodies. The eight women writers discussed - Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Josephine Butler, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dora Greenwell, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Procter and Christina Rossetti - provide accounts of prayer that stress that the only way to experience and respond to something of the transcendent is through embracing lived experience and through a recognition of the connectedness of all bodies.

In detailing how these writers engage with new ways of thinking about faith, desire and the material world, Ludlow argues that they offer models for ethical modes of being in the world and pave the way for later theologies of embodiment.

Review Quotes

"This book makes an important and unprecedented contribution to our appreciation of the diverse ways in which nineteenth-century women writers stressed the need for embodied participation in the divine through prayer and living prayerfully." --Joshua King, Professor of English and Director of Environmental Humanities, Baylor University, USA

"Ludlow's work challenges critical commonplaces which frame women writers' engagement with faith as an escape from the self, the body, and the pressing social and political concerns of their day. Instead, she demonstrates how these writers' explorations of Christian prayer as an embodied practice grounded them more fully in the world.

This timely intervention in nineteenth-century studies is essential reading for scholars interested in rethinking and revaluing the relationship between the spiritual and the material in women's writing and thinking." --Dinah Roe, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford Brookes University

About the Author