Edinburgh University Press
Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory
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Derek Ryan
About this book
Explores Woolf’s writing alongside Deleuze’s philosophy and new materialist theories of ‘sex’, ‘animal’, and ‘life’
How does Virginia Woolf conceptualise the material world? In what ways has Woolf’s modernism affected understandings of materiality, and what new perspectives does she offer contemporary theoretical debates? Derek Ryan demonstrates how materiality is theorised in Woolf’s writings by focusing on the connections she makes between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter. Through close readings of texts including To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, Flush, and ‘Sketch of the Past’, he details the fresh insights Woolf provides into issues concerning the natural world, sexual difference, sexuality, animality, and life itself.
Ryan opens up Woolf studies to new theoretical paradigms by placing Woolf in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze – who cites her modernist aesthetics as exemplary of some of his most important philosophical concepts – as well as eminent contemporary theorists including Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett, all of whom have influenced the recent critical turn towards new materialisms. Locating theory within Woolf’s writing as well as locating Woolf within theory, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life brings her modernism firmly into to the foreground of current debates in literary studies, feminist philosophy, queer theory, animal studies and posthumanities.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
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Acknowledgements
vi -
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Abbreviations
viii -
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Introduction: Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory
1 -
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1 Materials for Theory: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows
26 -
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2 Sexual Difference in Becoming: A Room of One’s Own and To the Lighthouse
58 -
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3 Queering Orlando and Non/Human Desire
101 -
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4 The Question of the Animal in Flush
132 -
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5 Quantum Reality and Posthuman Life: The Waves
171 -
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Bibliography
203 -
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Index
220
