Virginia Woolf in Context

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualized today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies.

Bryony Randall is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is author of Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life (2007) and has published articles on Gertrude Stein, New Woman short stories, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Richardson and H. D. She is co-editor of the upcoming Cambridge University Press edition of Virginia Woolf's short fiction.

Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow and a General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf. She has written several books on Virginia Woolf, including The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006) and The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (1998). She is editor of Woolf's To the Lighthouse for Cambridge University Press and co-editor of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents.