The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Transnational Perspectives considers the many steps of cultural mediation that have produced the varied versions of Woolf that readers and viewers encounter in national and transnational contexts. Organised in three parts, this international, multi-authored collection explores how these many Woolfs emerge in countries beyond Western Europe and North America, including Brazil, Lithuania, Japan, Turkey and the Philippines. The chapters in the first part explore how Woolf’s works are edited, translated, produced and read in many languages, media, platforms and disciplines, both historically and contemporarily. The second part focuses on Woolf’s legacy and on how Woolf lives on in the works of contemporary artists and cultural creatives. Given the importance of academics in mediating this reception, the third and final section reads Woolf through new critical perspectives, also focusing on the more recent reception she is enjoying on the web.

Elisa Bolchi is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Ferrara, Italy. She is founding member of the Italian Virginia Woolf Society and she has worked extensively on the Italian reception of Virginia Woolf publishing the books Il paese della bellezza. Virginia Woolf nelle riviste italiane tra le due guerre (2007) and L’indimenticabile artista. Lettere e appunti sulla storia editoriale di Virginia Woolf in Mondadori (2015). As the main output of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship she was awarded in 2019 she is now writing the monograph Virginia Woolf and Italian Readers (Palgrave Macmillan). In addition to reception studies, her research interests concern sociology of translation, rewriting and adaptation studies, archival studies.

Maria Rita Drumond Viana is professor C4 in the Department of Letters at the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil. Her main focus is on life writing by authors writing in English and how they are translated and edited in Portuguese. She is currently a board member of the International Yeats Society (vice-president) and of the International Virginia Woolf Society (bibliographer). She is also a translator and published a bilingual On Being Ill in co-authorship with Ana Carolina Mesquita for Editora Nós (2021). Her research is funded by CNPq.

Alice Davis Keane is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School, and she served as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Virginia Woolf Society from 2015-2020. Her research interests include Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, cultural studies and contemporary literature, and her recent publications include include “‘Virginia Woolf, Race and ‘Restorying’ in the 21st Century Classroom,” published in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany 101 (Fall/Winter 2023): 20-22; “Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Art Between the Wars,” published in Revista PHILIA | Filosofia, Literatura & Arte 4(1): 49-65 (September 2022); and “Love, Trauma and Memory in Recent Toni Morrison Scholarship,” published in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 8(1): 2-9 (February 2020). She is currently preparing a monograph on Virginia Woolf and contemporary Black women writers.

Monica Latham is a Professor of British Literature at the English Department of Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a specialist of Virginia Woolf and genetic criticism. She has published numerous articles on Virginia Woolf and other modernist and postmodernist authors. She is the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway (2015); Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (2021); Dans l’atelier de Virginia Woolf (forthcoming 2025); and Virginia Woolf in the French Imagination (forthcoming 2025). Monica Latham is the co-editor of the collection ‘Langues, Textes, Littératures’ and the series ‘Book, Page, Text, Image’ (Editions de l’Université de Lorraine), the co-editor of ‘Biofiction Studies’ (Bloomsbury), and the co-editor of the series ‘Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks’ (Brepols).

Sayaka Okumura is Associate Professor of English at Kobe University in Japan. She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2007 with a thesis concerning Virginia Woolf’s experimentation with material motifs in her fiction, and has read papers on Woolf at several conferences in the UK and other countries. Her publications on Woolf include articles in English Studies, The Virginia Woolf Bulletin, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Virginia Woolf Review, among others. She is also the editor, with another Japanese scholar, of a book on the history of English literature which was published through Mineruba-shobo in 2020. She is currently preparing a monograph on Woolf, Mansfield, and Bowen examining their common concern with the material world and related perceptions of time and space.