Virginia Woolf : Profession and Performance

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance explores the intersection of two fundamental interests of Virginia Woolf, offering to feminist modernist studies cutting-edge readings of primary works, comparative studies of Woolf and other modernist professionals–performers, and fresh accounts of Woolf’s relationship to women’s professional and public labor. The eleven chapters demonstrate the double valence of the volume’s key words: “performance” conveys acts of staging as well as occupational work while “profession” encompasses careers and occupations as well as staged declarations. Moreover, “performance” evokes a sense of the “performative”: speech acts, gestures, and other signifying behaviors that make something so, accomplishing and avowing lived realities as well as ethical values, socio-political positions, aesthetic preferences, and life-securing identities and hopes for the present and future. Beyond this semantic play, the stakes of the entanglement of profession and performance in Woolf’s life and work are far-reaching. Centering a concern with modernist networks, this collection explores women’s labor in literary and other aesthetic fields (e.g., publishing and photography), labor which professes new values and models new methods. Several chapters develop clarifying critiques of gender politics that reward the reproduction of professional status quos, highlighting subversive performances that threaten to unmoor, modify, or discard these politics.

Benjamin D. Hagen teaches at the University of South Dakota. He is a past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, a past organizer of the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, the current editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and the author of The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Clemson University Press, 2020). His research has appeared in the journals Age, Culture, Humanities; Comparative Critical Studies; Modernism/modernity; PMLA; Twentieth-Century Literature; and Virginia Woolf Miscellany as well as in book collections focused on Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, and Louise DeSalvo.

Taya Sazama is a PhD candidate at the University of South Dakota studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature with an emphasis on marriage, courtship, and education. Her review of Karen Bourrier’s Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (2019) appeared in the 2021 spring issue of Victorian Periodicals Review and her review of Freya Johnston’s Jane Austen, Early and Late (2021) was published with Review 19 in 2024. She currently serves on the steering committee to host the 2025 British Women Writers Conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.