Spirituality in literature

In my thesis, I examine the function and treatment of goddesses in six modern
feminist mythopoeic fantasy novels by Y olen, Shinn, and Harris. In these novels, the
goddesses and their worshippers serve as the agents of socio-political change within the
secondary world, inducing changes that end with the ultimate transformation of
oppressive social structures. Acknowledging these goddesses and incorporating them into
the fabric of communal life, the protagonists, and ultimately entire societies, are able
transcend issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion, in order to create a
peaceful and prosperous society. These novels work through many of the issues troubling
modern day feminist theorists and make important contributions to the discourse of
feminist spirituality and feminist theory as a whole. Extrapolating both a theory and
praxis from the texture of these fantasy narratives, I suggest that these stories offer a way
to transcend dichotomous thinking and escape the current stagnation of spirituality based
approaches to feminism.

During the nineteenth century, African American women like Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Julia Foote wrote narratives of their spiritual conversions. Through their efforts and the efforts of others like them, spiritual autobiographies became not only evangelical tools but also a means of shaping African American culture and American society in general. While some black women were working to claim power for their gender and race by writing spiritual narratives, other women, both black and white, were working with sentimental literature to achieve similar goals.

A recent trend in Spenser studies that relies heavily on materialist thinking either undervalues or misses altogether The Faerie Queene's inherent spiritual quality along with the irreducible interaction and ultimate reciprocity of earth and heaven. This thesis argues that Edmund Spenser's spiritual vision in The Faerie Queene expresses itself in a teleological romance that assumes a condition of mutability over stasis in the temporal earthly realm, as its first three heroes ascend a ladder of perfection that evokes the heavenly and eternal, while at the same time heavenly glory reaches down into the story "romancing" the characters and exerting its own influence on the action.