This volume asks how Woolf conceptualized peace by exploring various experimental forms she created in response to violence and crisis. Across fifteen chapters written by an international array of scholars, this book draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s aesthetics and deepens our understanding of her writing about war, ethics, feminism and European culture.
This volume enlarges our understanding of Virginia Woolf's pacifist ideology and aesthetic response to the World Wars by re-examining her writings and cultural contexts transnationally and comparatively through the complex interplay between modernism, politics, and aesthetics. The 'transnational' paradigm that undergirds this collection revolves around the idea of transnational cultural communities of writers, artists, and musicians worldwide who were intellectually involved in the war effort through the forging of pacifist cultural networks that arose as a form of resistance to war, militarism, and the rise of fascism.
Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Transnational Circulations enlarges our understanding of Virginia Woolf’s pacifist ideology and aesthetic response to the World Wars by re-examining her writings and cultural contexts transnationally and comparatively through the complex interplay between modernism, politics, and aesthetics. The “transnational” paradigm that undergirds this collection revolves around the idea of transnational cultural communities of writers, artists, and musicians worldwide who were intellectually involved in the war effort through the forging of pacifist cultural networks that arose as a form of resistance to war, militarism, and the rise of fascism. The book also offers philosophical approaches to notions of transnational pacifism, anti-war ethics, and decolonization, examining how Woolf’s prose undermines center/edge or self/other bifurcations. Breathing new life into Woolf’s anti-war writings through a transnational lens and presenting us with the voices and perspectives of a range of significant scholars and critics, the chapters in this volume engage with mobile and circulatory pacifisms, calling attention to the intersections of modernist inquiries across the arts (art, music, literature, and performance) and transnational critical spaces (Asia, Europe, and the Americas) to show how the convergence of different cultural and linguistic horizons can significantly expand and enrich our understanding of Woolf’s modernist legacy.
From the "prying," "insidious" "fingers of the European War" that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to "think peace into existence" during the Blitz in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid," questions of war and peace pervade the writings of Virginia Woolf. This volume asks how Woolf conceptualised peace by exploring the various experimental forms she created in response to war and violence. Comprised of fifteen chapters by an international array of leading and emerging scholars, this book both draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf's modernist aesthetic and draws on various critical frameworks for reading her work, in order to deepen our understanding of her writing about the politics of war, ethics, feminism, class, animality, and European culture. The chapters collected here look at how we might re-read Woolf and her contemporaries in the light of new theoretical and aesthetical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicise these frameworks through Woolf's own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while also bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In doing so, this volume reassesses the role of Europe and peace in Woolf's work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.
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.
Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Transnational Circulations enlarges our understanding of Virginia Woolf's pacifist ideology and aesthetic response to the European wars by re-examining her writings and cultural contexts transnationally and comparatively through the complex interplay between modernism, politics, and aesthetics. The "transnational" paradigm that undergirds the book revolves around the idea of cosmopolitan cultural communities of writers, artists, and musicians worldwide who were intellectually involved in the war effort through the forging of pacifist cultural networks that arose as a form of resistance to war, militarism, and the rise of fascism. The essays presented in this volume engage with this type of mobile and circulatory pacifisms, calling attention to the intersections of modernist inquiries across the arts (art, music, literature, and performance) and transnational critical spaces (Asia, Europe, and the Americas) to show how the convergence of different cultural and linguistic horizons can significantly expand and enrich our understanding of Woolf's modernist legacy.
Virginia Woolf was a civilian, a noncombatant during the Great War. Unlike the war poet Wilfred Owen, she had not seen "God through mud." Yet, although she was remembered by her husband as "the least political animal . . . since Aristotle invented the definition," and called "an instinctive pacifist" by Alex Zwerdling, her experience and memory of the war became a touchstone against which life itself was measured. Virginia Woolf and the Great War focuses on Woolf's war consciousness and how her sensitivity to representations of war in the popular press and authorized histories affected both the development of characters in her fiction and her nonfictional and personal writings. As the seamless history of the prewar world had been replaced by the realities of modem war, Woolf herself understood there was no immunity from its ravages, even for civilians. Karen L. Levenback's readings of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years, in particular—together with her understanding of civilian immunity, the operation of memory in the postwar period, and lexical resistance to accurate representations of war—are profoundly convincing in securing Woolf's position as a war novelist and thinker whose insights and writings anticipate our most current progressive theories on war's social effects and continuing presence.
This volume asks how Woolf conceptualized peace by exploring various experimental forms she created in response to violence and crisis. Across fifteen chapters written by an international array of scholars, this book draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf's aesthetics and deepens our understanding of her writing about war, ethics, feminism and European culture.
Recycling Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Art and Literature exam>ines Woolf’s life and oeuvre from the perspective of recycling and pro>vides answers to essential questions such as: Why do artists and writers recycle Woolf’s texts and introduce them into new circuits of meaning? Why do they perpetuate her iconic fgure in literature, art and popular culture? What does this practice of recycling tell us about the endurance of her oeuvre on the current literary, artistic and cultural scene and what does it tell us about our current modes of production and consumption of art and literature? This volume offers theoretical defnitions of the concept of recycling applied to a multitude of specifc case studies. The reasons why Woolf’s work and authorial fgure lend themselves so well to the notion of recy>cling are manifold: frst, Woolf was a recycler herself and had a personal theory and practice of recycling; second, her work continues to be a prolifc compost that is used in various ways by contemporary writers and artists; fnally, since Woolf has left the original literary sphere to permeate popular culture, the limits of what has been recycled have ex>panded in unexpected ways. These essays explore today’s trends of fab>ricating new, original artefacts with Woolf’s work, which thus remains completely relevant to our contemporary needs and beliefs
