This symposium brings together authors in religious studies and literary studies to discuss Charles Andrews’s recent 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic title, The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology: Challenging the Nation (Bloomsbury, 2024).
We welcome Suzanne Hobson, David Sherman, and Stephanie Paulsell to discuss key points within Andrew’s monograph, with a response from Andrews himself to his discussants.
A preview of the work comes from Bloomsbury’s website:
“This book considers novels 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 authors’ theopolitical imaginations.“Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.”
