Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1925. / Vita. Thesis note on label mounted on p. [ii]. Published also without thesis note. "Bibliographical notes upon the work of Mrs. Meynell": p. 259-271.

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The Poetry of Religion and the Prose of Life: From Evangelicalism to Immanence in British Women's Writing, 1835-1925&" traces a tradition of religious women poets and women's poetic communities engaged in generic and theological exploration that I argue was intimately intertwined with their social activism. This project brings together recent debates about gender and secularization in sociology, social history, and anthropology of religion, contending that Victorian and early-twentieth-century women poets from a variety of religious affiliations offer an alternative path into modernity that embraces the public value of both poetry and religious discourse, thus questioning straightforward narratives of British secularization and poetic privatization during the nineteenth century. These writers, including contributors to The Christian Lady's Magazine, Grace Aguilar, Dora Greenwell, Alice Meynell, Eva Gore-Booth, and Evelyn Underhill, turned to social engagement and immanence, a theory of divinity within the world rather than above and apart from it, to bridge a widening gap between religious doctrine and poetic theory. Appropriating the growing interest in immanent theology within British Christianity allowed women to write about the small, the domestic, the human, and the everyday while exploring the divine presence in them, thus elevating and publicly revealing experiences traditionally allocated to women's private lives. Just as the women in this study questioned the distinction between the divine and the everyday, they also blurred the generic boundaries of poetry and theological prose. As lyric poetry was increasingly identified with private experience, they used literary experimentation across the genres of poetry and theological prose to engage public debates on a surprisingly large number of issues from factory reform, to mental disability, to urban poverty, to women's suffrage, to pacifism. This project includes four chapters, each of which examines a female poet or a poetic community of women connected through the publishing world. The first two chapters focus on tensions among commitments to poetry, religion, and social reform within Anglicanism. Trapped between the desire to encounter a transcendent God and the desire to celebrate earthly ephemera and improve earthly conditions, these poets demonstrate the tension from which a poetics of immanence arose. My third and fourth chapters follow the extension of immanence in late-nineteenth-century Catholic verse and early-twentieth-century mystical verse. These writers used a growing theological emphasis on immanence to justify poetry that relied on female experience, to suggest that the divine was at home in the constantly evolving natural and social worlds, and to illustrate God's equal proximity to the mundane and the marginalized, inspiring challenges to social and institutional hierarchies.

Defining rarity as a relative quality in matter roughly opposite to density, this dissertation focusses on the way material qualities of molecular gases, such as semi-opacity, permeation, and blending, inform modernist representations of embodied spatial experience. In modernist writing, rare matter—including air, fog, smoke, and haze—functions as an active component of the sensory environment, filling up the negative space that sets off subjects from objects, and characters from settings. Representing matter across the full range of the rarity-density spectrum allows modernist writers to challenge the ontological status of such boundaries, and to develop dynamic spatial models of the self-world threshold. The Introduction defines rare matter and examines its function as a sensory medium that can alternately define and blur subject/object boundaries. Interpreting dynamic thresholds as products of authorial activism, I argue that modernist narratives disrupt the normative constructions of the self-world boundary that prevailed in biomedical discourse around the turn of the century. Chapter 1, seeking to expand the scope of modernist object studies to include rare matter, analyzes illustrated books about London to demonstrate the increased cultural visibility of the atmosphere in the modernist period. Visual and verbal gestalt effects, modelled on the hermeneutic oscillation between looking at and looking through the fog, foreground the materiality of the atmosphere that fills up three-dimensional space, pressing up against the thresholds of the body and disrupting fixed distinctions between subjects and their surroundings. Chapter 2 shows how D. H. Lawrence harnesses the properties of rare matter to construct dynamic representations of the self-world boundary. In his early novels and his criticism, the oscillation between self-diffusion and self-differentiation expresses characters’ psychological responsiveness to changing interpersonal and ontological pressures. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Virginia Woolf takes advantage of rare attributes like permeation, fluid motion, and variable particle spacing to model process-oriented communities that incorporate dynamic shifts between social autonomy and collective identity. The Conclusion examines rare imagery in modernist scenes of narration, arguing that dynamic self-world thresholds help to articulate a responsive form of reader-text interaction that allows for the alternation of independent and collaborative reading practices.

Defining rarity as a relative quality in matter roughly opposite to density, this dissertation focusses on the way material qualities of molecular gases, such as semi-opacity, permeation, and blending, inform modernist representations of embodied spatial experience. In modernist writing, rare matter—including air, fog, smoke, and haze—functions as an active component of the sensory environment, filling up the negative space that sets off subjects from objects, and characters from settings. Representing matter across the full range of the rarity-density spectrum allows modernist writers to challenge the ontological status of such boundaries, and to develop dynamic spatial models of the self-world threshold. The Introduction defines rare matter and examines its function as a sensory medium that can alternately define and blur subject/object boundaries. Interpreting dynamic thresholds as products of authorial activism, I argue that modernist narratives disrupt the normative constructions of the self-world boundary that prevailed in biomedical discourse around the turn of the century. Chapter 1, seeking to expand the scope of modernist object studies to include rare matter, analyzes illustrated books about London to demonstrate the increased cultural visibility of the atmosphere in the modernist period. Visual and verbal gestalt effects, modelled on the hermeneutic oscillation between looking at and looking through the fog, foreground the materiality of the atmosphere that fills up three-dimensional space, pressing up against the thresholds of the body and disrupting fixed distinctions between subjects and their surroundings. Chapter 2 shows how D. H. Lawrence harnesses the properties of rare matter to construct dynamic representations of the self-world boundary. In his early novels and his criticism, the oscillation between self-diffusion and self-differentiation expresses characters’ psychological responsiveness to changing interpersonal and ontological pressures. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Virginia Woolf takes advantage of rare attributes like permeation, fluid motion, and variable particle spacing to model process-oriented communities that incorporate dynamic shifts between social autonomy and collective identity. The Conclusion examines rare imagery in modernist scenes of narration, arguing that dynamic self-world thresholds help to articulate a responsive form of reader-text interaction that allows for the alternation of independent and collaborative reading practices.