A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of “long modernism.” In recent decades, Virginia Woolf’s contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called “odd affinities” that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace—and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"— the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured. Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury— John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others—and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her last, Between the Acts.

Preliminary Material --Introduction: The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London /Lawrence Phillips --A Risky Business: Going Out in the Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson /Nadine Attewell --"A Filmless London": Flânerie and Urban Culture in Dorothy Richardson's Articles for Close Up --Virgina Woolf's London and the Archaeology of Character /Vicki Tromanhauser --Treasure Seekers in the City: London in the Novels of E. Nesbit /Jenny Bavidge --"Thou art full of Stirs, a Tumultuous City": Storm Jameson and London in the 1920s /Chiara Briganti --"A Network of Inscrutable Canyons": Wartime London's Sensory Landscapes /Sara Wasson --Tales from the Crypt: Wartime London in Graham Swift's Shuttlecock /Ingrid Gunby --My Doingthings: London According to B. S. Johnson /Philip Tew --Cheerleading and Charting the Cosmopolis: London as Linear Narrative and Contested Space /Rob Burton --Shades of the Eighties: The Colour of Memory /Joe Brooker --Julian Barnes and the Marginalisation of Metropolitanism: The Suburban Centre in Metroland and Letters from London /Keith Wilson --"This Patron of the Spurned, this Perambulator of Margins, this Witness": Iain Sinclair as Rag-picker /Samantha Skinner --Images of London in African Literature: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy and Dambudzo Marechera's The Black Insider /Kwadwo Jnr Osei-Nyame --Andrea Levy's London Novels /Susan Alice Fischer --Notes on Contributors /Lawrence Phillips --Index /Lawrence Phillips.

The writers of these works make the transition from folk psychology, theological views on human nature and metaphysical speculation to a more empirical and scientific study of the human mind, giving an insight into how pyschology emerged.

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