Secularization and the Construction of an Author–Reader Intellectual Community: A Study of Virginia Woolf’s Religious Legacies
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The secularization of religion in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Britain profoundly altered the ethical foundations of the modernist novel, challenging writers to reimagine the role of literature in the absence of religious authority. Against this backdrop, the present study investigates how modernist authors—exemplified by Virginia Woolf—both inherited and transformed the ethical ideals of religious communities. Through a comparative approach, this article traces the secularization of the Clapham Sect’s “moral covenant” and the Quaker notion of the “inner light”, revealing how these religious legacies, as mediated through the intellectual frameworks of Leslie Stephen and George Moore, contributed to Woolf’s construction of an author–reader intellectual community. The study demonstrates how this religious inheritance is reconfigured in Woolf’s theory of the ‘common reader,’ highlighting her contribution to modernist aesthetics and ethics. Through the figure of the ‘common reader,’ religion emerges not as a set of fixed doctrines, but as a foundation for constructing ethical communities in a secular age.
Source: Humanities
DOI: 10.3390/h14100197
Author: Qiong Yu
Institution: Beijing Foreign Studies University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,689
OpenAlex ID: W4415129372