‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ – Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Every year, on ‘a Wednesday in mid-June’, Dallowday is celebrated in recognition of the life and work of Virginia Woolf, one of modernist literature’s most innovative and dynamic writers. To mark the occasion, we’ve compiled a list of books from Clemson University Press and our Writers and Their Work series and articles from our journals collection that capture a flavour of some of the energetic and exciting scholarship taking place in contemporary Woolf studies.

We’re also running a 50% discount on our Virginia Woolf books until 20th June 2022. To take advantage of this offer, use discount code WOOLF50 at checkout (for USA & Canada orders, use discount code WOOLF22 at global.oup.com/academic). View all books available in this offer here.

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Virginia Woolf, Laura Marcus (‘Writers and Their Work’)

In the new edition of her highly regarded study, Laura Marcus examines a wide range of Virginia Woolf’s novels, short stories, essays and autobiographical writings in the context of themes and topics of central contemporary relevance and interest: time, history and narrative; modernism and the city; gender, sexuality and identity; art and life-writings. As well as exploring her significance for, and contribution to, feminist debates and to definitions of modernism, the book also includes detailed analyses of all Woolf’s novels an her non-fiction writings, including A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas and the ‘biography’ Flush. It considers current theoretical approaches to Woolf’s work and also engages with Woolf’s own cultural contexts, exploring, for example, her responses to war, to Freud’s theories, and to early twentieth-century theories of sexuality and gender identity, and the transition from Victorianism to modernity.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: Invisible Presences, Molly Hoff

In this companion book to Mrs. Dalloway, Molly Hoff illuminates much that is hidden in Virginia Woolf’s celebrated and often misunderstood novel. Mrs. Dalloway is brimming with references, both overt and subtle, to other works of literature, historical events, and goings-on in Woolf’s own life. Invisible Presences serves, as Hoff states in her preface, “as a kind of reference manual for commentary on individual passages that may be of interest.” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences will doubtless provide a wealth of material to enrich lesson plans and syllabi for those who, as Hoff puts it, “profess literature.” It however has its own beginning, middle, and end to guide any reader. Thus it serves as two books at once. It is hoped it will lead to a deep understanding of Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf’s method in general.

Woolf and the City, edited by Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah E. Cornish

Woolf and the City collects important essays selected from the nearly 200 papers delivered at the nineteenth annual international conference on Virginia Woolf. The volume includes an introduction by the editors, the conference keynote addresses, and twenty-five essays organized around six presiding themes: Navigating London; Spatial Perceptions and the Cityscape; Regarding Others; The Literary Public Sphere; Border Crossings, and Liminal Landscapes; and Teaching Woolf, Woolf Teaching. It also includes a special session of the conference, a round-table conversation on Woolf’s legacy in and out of the academy. Beyond the volume’s focus on urban issues, many of the essays address the ethical and political implications of Woolf’s work, a move that suggests new insights into Woolf as a “real world” social critic. The contributors, who include Ruth Gruber, Molly Hite, Mark Hussey, Tamar Katz, Eleanor McNees, Kathryn Simpson, and Rishona Zimring, advance Woolf studies and the broader fields of narrative studies, cultural geography, urban theory, phenomenology, and gender studies.

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace, Vol. 2: Aesthetics and Theory, edited by Peter Adkins and Derek Ryan

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.

Gastro-modernism: Food, Literature, Culture, edited by Derek Gladwin

This volume of essays surveys gastronomy across global literary modernisms. Modernists explore public and domestic spaces where food and drink are prepared and served, as much as they create them in the modernist imagination through narrative, language, verse, and style. Modernism as a cultural and artistic movement also highlights the historical politics of food and eating. This timely volume ultimately shows how global literary modernisms engage with food culture known as gastronomy to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce. Lauren Rich’s essay ‘A Woolf at the Table: Virginia Woolf and the Domestic Dinner Party’ will be of particular interest to Woolf scholars.

Virginia Woolf and the Natural World, edited by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman

This volume explores Woolf’s complex engagement with the natural world, an engagement that was as political as it was aesthetic. The diversity of topics within this collection—ecofeminism, the nature of time, the nature of the self, nature and sporting, botany, climate, and landscape, just to name a few—fosters a deeper understanding of the nature of nature in Woolf’s works. Contributors include Bonnie Kime Scott, Carrie Rohman, Diana Swanson, Elisa Kay Sparks, Beth Rigel Daugherty, Jane Goldman, and Diane Gillespie, among many others from the international community of Woolf scholars.

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JOURNAL ARTICLES

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies

From Virginia’s Sister to Friday’s Silence Presence, Metaphor, and the Persistence of Disability in Contemporary Writing
Stuart Murray

Australian Journal of French Studies

Images of Effacement: Deconstructing Maurice Blanchot’s Reading of Virginia Woolf in Le Livre à venir
Caroline Sheaffer-Jones

Journal of Romance Studies

Mourning and the ethics of form in Sartre’s La Nausée and Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse
Ursula Tidd

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image

Framing Ambiguity and Desire through Musical Means in Sally Potter’s Film ‘Orlando’
Ruth Lee Martin