From Stewardship to Co-Presence: Literary Form and Post-ChristianEcological Imagination in Virginia Woolf, 1927–1941

Abstract

This study argues that Virginia Woolf’s four novels (1927–1941) develop a “post-Christian ecological imagi-nation” that responds to a formal problem in contemporary ecological theology: even its most relational ver-sions—from Bauckham’s “community of creation” to Keller’s creatio ex profundis—rewrite the content of stewardship while preserving the human as reflective ethical agent at three formal levels: grammar, tempo-rality, and affect. Woolf’s late fiction reworks all three. At the level of grammar, the bracketed deaths in “Time Passes” demote the human from sentence-subject to subordinate clause. At the level of temporality, the cosmic interludes of The Waves and the prehistoric strata of Between the Acts embed human lives within nonhuman duration. At the level of affect, the olfactory narration of Flush and the “mirror scene” of Between the Acts relocate the subject of grief from the human onto objects, animals, and landscape. These three formal re-sources—decentered syntax, durational temporality, and non-anthropocentric grief—do not propose a new theological paradigm. Rather, they illuminate three formal problems that any non-anthropocentric ecological theology must confront if it is to move beyond human-centered models of care, responsibility, and mourning. By attending to Woolf’s literary form, theology may expand its imaginative vocabulary for thinking creation beyond the privileged position of the human subject.