Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe

The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European fortunes. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which Virginia Woolf has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe. Diverse as her reception has been, as analyst of consciousness, as a decadent (censored and banned), as stylistic innovator of Modernism, as crusading feminist and socialist, and as a model for other writers, she has emerged as one of the foremost writers and principal icons of the century.

Elinor Shaffer, FBA, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, has published on Romantic and Victorian literature, is author of 'Kubla Khan' and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, edited the annual journal Comparative Criticism, and most recently has contributed to Samuel Butler: Victorian Against the Grain.