Misako YORA

English Literature

My research focuses on modernist novels, with a particular interest in questions of religion, politics, and feminism. In my doctoral thesis, I argue that Christianity serves as a significant undercurrent for the political views of non-believing modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, and Winifred Holtby. Through the case studies of these authors, I rethink the general assumption that Christianity is necessarily combined with right-wing or reactionary politics.

While I have published articles on canonical modernists such as Woolf, I am also working on “middlebrow” writers, including Macaulay, Holtby, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, Rebecca West, and Agatha Christie.

My ongoing project examines the concept of “efficiency” in the works of women writers from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.