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book: Virginia Woolf – Objects, Things, Matter
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Virginia Woolf – Objects, Things, Matter

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Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025

About this book

The first book-length account of Woolf’s vital, active and strange objects, things and matter

  • Offers a wide range of theoretical and creative engagements with objects, things and matter in Woolf’s fiction and nonfiction from leading and emerging scholars
  • Brings together short, object-focused chapters and longer chapters that illuminate Woolf’s material engagements
  • Features creative experiments inspired by Woolf’s attention to objects, which are accompanied by author/artist notes
  • Includes an extended introduction that concisely overviews the theoretical approaches to the three key terms of the volume

Virginia Woolf’s deep and creative interest in materiality is not only illuminated by but precedes current theorisations of objects, things and matter – among them, new materialism, object-oriented ontology and thing theory. Through both critical and creative engagements, contributors explore the possibilities and limitations of these theoretical accounts: what new readings they afford; what they say that Woolf has already shown us; and how Woolf goes beyond or can’t be fully captured by these ideas. This volume thus gathers various, sometimes even contradictory, approaches on the topic; in turn, it emphasises congruences and tensions in theoretical, literary and cultural interpretations of Woolf’s material investments. What emerges in Virginia Woolf – Objects, Things, Matter is an account of how Woolf reveals things to be vital, active and strange by refiguring the relationship between subject and object and, at times, even inverting, subverting or redefining those very terms.

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    v
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    Figures

    viii
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    Note on the Cover

    x
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    Acknowledgements

    xii
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    Series Preface

    xiii
    Derek Ryan
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    Abbreviations

    xiv
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    Notes on Contributors

    xv
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    Introduction: Virginia Woolf – Objects, Things, Matter

    1
    Laci Mattison
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  • Part I Approaches to Objects, Things and Matter in Woolf
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    Chapter 1 Virginia Woolf and Modernist New Materialism

    27
    Derek Ryan
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    Chapter 2 Jacob’s Im/material Form

    43
    Geoff Bender
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    Chapter 3 Inanimacy: Virginia Woolf’s Materialisms

    62
    Maurizia Boscagli
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    Chapter 4 ‘Of being herself invisible’: Object, Thing, Matter and Use in Mrs Dalloway and Three Guineas

    84
    Ann Martin
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    Chapter 5 A Toy Boat of Her Own: Gender, Play and Education in Virginia Woolf’s Writings

    104
    Imola Nagy-Seres
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    Chapter 6 Cotton, Race, Embodiment and ‘the thing itself’ in Woolf

    122
    Jane Garrity
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    Chapter 7 Virginia Woolf’s Misuse of ‘Cotton Wool’ in ‘A Sketch of the Past’: Writing the Wound

    141
    Davi Pinho
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  • Part II Object Experiments with Woolf
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    Chapter 8 Object Lessons

    163
    Shilo McGiff
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    Chapter 9 Material Reading: Letterpress Printing with Woolf

    173
    Ane Thon Knutsen
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    Chapter 10 The Life of Monday or Tuesday

    182
    Jane Goldman
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    Chapter 11 More Surfaces: A Monologue, or the Queer Interiorities of a Gramophone

    187
    James Brock
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    Chapter 12 six

    193
    Erik Fuhrer
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    Chapter 13 Spider Kingdom

    197
    Brandi George
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  • Part III A Collection of Woolfian Things
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    Chapter 14 The Jug in the Borderland

    209
    Douglas Mao
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    Chapter 15 ‘Enjoying this immortal rhythm’: Woolf and the Gramophone

    221
    Aimée Gasston
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    Chapter 16 The Ghostly Pencil

    232
    Graham Fraser
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    Chapter 17 ‘tremb tremulous fitful’: Missed Encounters in Mirrors

    242
    Melissa Alexander
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    Chapter 18 The ‘Vanished’ Walrus Pen-Wiper: Waste and the Animal Object

    254
    Laci Mattison
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    Chapter 19 Pointz Hall as Hyperobject: Woolf’s Deep Geological History in Between the Acts

    266
    Leanna Lostoski-Ho
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    Afterword: Upheavals of Matter

    277
    Bill Brown
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    Index

    291
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
April 23, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781399517027
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
320
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781399517027
eBook ISBN: 9781399517027
Keywords for this book
Virginia Woolf; materiality; modernism; objects and things; new materialism; object-oriented ontology
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
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