Table of contents

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.

The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf’s novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics. An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf’s processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself – a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text. The study investigates key dimensions of aesthetic vision. It addresses vision in the context of theories of aesthetic experience and identifies a semantics of seeing. It analyses functions of symbolic materiality in the presentation of boundaries of perception, modes of temporality and poetic potentialities. In exploring the connections between vision and language, it seeks to provide new perspectives for a reassessment of what occurs in Modernism's relation to vision.

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.

A Companion to Virginia Woolf is a thorough examination of her life, work, and multiple contexts in 33 essays written by leading scholars in the field. Contains insightful and provocative new scholarship and sketches out new directions for future research Approaches Woolf's writing from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including modernism, post-colonialism, queer theory, animal studies, digital humanities, and the law Explores the multiple trajectories Woolf’s work travels around the world, from the Bloomsbury Group, and the Hogarth Press to India and Latin America Situates Woolf studies at the vanguard of contemporary literature scholarship and the new modernist studies

Covering a wide range of historical, theoretical, critical and cultural contexts, this collection studies key issues in contemporary Woolf studies.

Animal Subjects finds a new understanding of animal life in the literature and science of the early twentieth century.