Liverpool University Press Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Vol. 2 Aesthetics and Theory (Clemson University Press: Woolf Selected Papers)

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. About the Author Peter Adkins is an assistant lecturer at the University of Kent. He has recently completed a PhD on modernism and the Anthropocene which examined how the novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes responded to changing ideas about the planet, nonhuman life and the figure of the human in the early twentieth century. He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent and author of Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh UP, 2015). He has published widely on modernism and animality and is currently completing, with Linden Peach and Jane Goldman, the Cambridge Edition of Woolf's Flush: A Biography. His most recent book is The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (Bloomsbury, 2018), edited with Stephen Ross, and he is Literature Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.