This volume offers a new account of the relationship between literary and secularist scenes of writing in interwar Britain. Organized secularism has sometimes been seen as a phenomenon that lived and died with the nineteenth century. But associations such as the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association survived into the twentieth and found new purpose in the promotion and publishing of serious literature. This book assembles a group of literary figures whose work was recommended as being of particular interest to the unbelieving readership targeted by these organisations. Some, including Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, Naomi Mitchison, and K.S. Bhat, were members or friends of the R.P.A.; others, such as Mary Butts, were sceptical but nonetheless registered its importance in their work; a third group, including D.H. Lawrence and George Moore, wrote in ways seen as sympathetic to the Rationalist cause. All of these writers produced fiction that was experimental in form and, though few of them could be described as modernist, they shared with modernist writers a will to innovate. This book explores how Rationalist ideas were adapted and transformed by these experiments, focusing in particular on the modifications required to accommodate the strong mode of unbelief associated with British secularism to the notional mode of belief usually solicited by fiction. Whereas modernism is often understood as the literature for a secular age, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture looks elsewhere to find a literature that draws more directly on secularism for its aesthetics and its ethics.

The Lost Girls analyses a number of British writers between 1850 and 1930 for whom the myth of Demeter's loss and eventual recovery of her cherished daughter Kore-Persephone, swept off in violent and catastrophic captivity by Dis, God of the Dead, had both huge personal and aesthetic significance. This book, in addition to scrutinising canonical and less well-known texts by male authors such as Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, also focuses on unjustly neglected women writers – Mary Webb and Mary Butts – who utilised occult tropes to relocate themselves culturally, and especially in Butts's case to recover and restore a forgotten legacy, the myth of matriarchal origins. These novelists are placed in relation not only to one another but also to Victorian archaeologists and especially to Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), one of the first women to distinguish herself in the history of British Classical scholarship and whose anthropological approach to the study of early Greek art and religion both influenced – and became transformed by – the literature. Rather than offering a teleological argument that moves lock-step through the decades,The Lost Girls proposes chapters that detail specific engagements with Demeter-Persephone through which to register distinct literary-cultural shifts in uses of the myth and new insights into the work of particular writers.

This is a deconstruction of Qur'anic discourse for the 21st century where the salient discursive concepts of Qur'anic discourse are located and deconstructed to reveal their meanings in English through the use of a most reputable Concordance of the Qur'an. The key linchpin discursive concepts found under the rubric of the Divine Names and Attributes of Almighty Allah (SWT) in Qur'anic discourse are all deconstructed revealing the Qur'anic praxis driven by its methodology and instruments of power, its Order of Power, through its application to self, the believer renovates and refurbishes the total self at the level of the idea, discourse and action, Qur'anic praxis, to attain the Bliss in the second creation and the outpouring of the Sakinah in the present life.

The author called Ashe of rings, her first published novel, a "War-Fairy-Tale," as it deals with the Badbury Rings, "a set of prehistoric concentric earthworks in south Dorset," those who are sympathetic to this landscape and those who are antagonistic to it. In Imaginary letters, the author writes to the mother of her lover, Boris, a Russian emigré. Traps for unbelievers and Warning to hikers are companion pieces, "addressing the need for preserving the land and retaining or restoring some sort of spiritual consciousness." Ghosties and ghoulies is the author's study of ghost fiction. -- Preface, p. x-xiii.

Gendering Classicism explores the intersection of feminism, historical fiction, and modernism through the work of six writers, all of whom wrote historical novels set in ancient Greece or Rome: Naomi Mitchison, Mary Butts, Laura Riding, Phyllis Bentley, Bryher, and Mary Renault. As women gained access to higher education in the late nineteenth century, they gained access also to the classical learning that had for so long demarcated and legitimated the British ruling classes. Steeped in misogyny, the classical tradition presented educated women with a massive project: the recasting of that tradition in terms that acknowledged the existence of women - as historical agents and interpreters of the historical past.