The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology : Challenging the Nation

A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEnovels by Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology - works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War - this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion - the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity.Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the autho