Spiritual Responses to American Literary Modernism

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).

• SECTION ONE:  Religious Reconciliations and Redefinitions of Modernism.- Chapter 1: “The American Review and the Theopoetics of Interwar Modernism”.- Chapter 2: “A Tale of Two Immigrant Toms: The Anglo-American Ascetic Response to Modernism”.- Chapter 3: “God, the Middlebrow, and The Bookman”.- Chapter 4: “Thomas Wolfe Confronts Modernism’s ‘Futility People’”.- SECTION TWO:  Gendered Regenerations.- Chapter 5: “To Market, to Market: Jesse Redmon Fauset’s Critique of Secular Materialism as Spiritual Death in Plum Bun”.- Chapter 6: “’Making the Jump’: Eudora Welty’s Empathy as Antidote to Modernist Alienation".- Chapter 7: “Redemption, Regeneration and the Gothic Sublime in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood”.- Chapter 8: “In Love with Life’s Spirit: Idealistic Devotion in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931) and Lucy Gayheart (1935)”.- SECTION THREE:   Doubt and Degradation as Displaced Faith and Transcendence.- Chapter 9: "Love and Loss and Questions Without Answers: Faith and Doubt in The Bridge of San Luis Rey".-  Chapter 10: “Faulkner’s Darl as Modernist Scapegoat”.- Chapter 11: “Henry Miller’s spiritual quest: ‘sow strife and ferment so that... the dead may be restored to life".- Chapter 12: “The Abyss of Faith in The Big Sleep”.