Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene
Will be published approx. on 31. January 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
296 pages
978-1-3995-1669-3 (ISBN)
Description
The first half of the twentieth century was a period of accelerated resource extraction, industrial intensification and tipping points in pollution levels, hastening the emergence of an epoch in which humans are the key drivers of planetary change. Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene situates Woolf's oeuvre as an important body of work within the literary history of our new planetary period, showing how her fiction and non-fiction engages with questions around climate change, environmental politics, imperial extractivism, eco-philosophy, species difference, natural history and extinction. Bringing together leading and emergent scholars, this collection recognises Woolf as a writer who was profoundly influenced by ecological and environmental questions throughout her life. It brings to light how Woolf responded to the environmental changes of her time and illuminates how her literary innovations continue to offer compelling ways of imagining the nonhuman and the planetary in our present moment.
Reviews / Votes
This collection... offers crucial insights especially for researchers interested in exploring the different realities and different modes of being in the world that animate Virginia Woolf's writing and resonate with the kind of rethinking required in the Anthropocene. -- Dr. Shahira Hathout, York University * The Modernist Review * This valuable collection assesses Woolf's potential to address the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene through her distinct feminist modernism. Essays from both veteran and more recent critics address useful angles, including climate change, extraction of resources, materialist visions of extinction, and new sources for interspecies, planetary communication and collaboration. -- Bonnie Kime Scott, San Diego State University These rich, intensive and impressive pieces of work force us to recognise how much more radical and prophetic Virginia Woolf's work really is than has been understood. This excellent collection explores how Woolf anticipated present concerns, setting humans against the planet's deep history and entangled within vast nonhuman forces that haunt our pretensions and threaten disaster. -- Louise Westling, University of OregonMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
4 black and white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 155 mm
Width: 236 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
440 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-1669-3 (9781399516693)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Peter Adkins is Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (2022) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (2020). He has written widely on modernism, the environment and posthumanism.
Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Preface
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Anthropocene, Peter Adkins
PART I: IMAGINING CLIMATE
1. Virginia Woolf and Anticipations of the Anthropocene, Christina Alt
2. Cosmopolitan Anthropocene: The Convergence of Transnationalism and Climatic Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's The Years, Shinjini Chattopadhyay
PART II: MATTER AND MATERIALITIES
3. Outside the Anthropocene: The Subject of Virginia Woolf, Claire Colebrook
4. 'Mud and dung': Virginia Woolf's Environmental Mattering of War, Molly Volanth Hall
5. Following the Oil: Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Imperial Extractivism, Peter Adkins
PART III: WRITING EXTINCTION
6. Hearing Beyond Extinction: The Inhuman Comedy of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Rasheed Tazudeen
7. The Rat or the Flower? Decomposed Being(s) in the Holograph Draft of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Shilo McGiff
PART IV: MORE THAN HUMAN ENCOUNTERS
8. Darwinism, Dogs and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf, Saskia McCracken
9. Virginia Woolf's 'Bewildering World', Derek Ryan
PART V: OUTSIDERS, ASSEMBLAGES AND ACTIVISM
10. 'Suspending the Sky': Virginia Woolf and the Brazilian Indigenous Worldview of Ailton Krenak, Davi Pinho and Maria A. de Oliveria
11. Staging Collective Action for an Anthropocene Audience in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Kelly Sultzbach
Index
Acknowledgements
Series Preface
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Anthropocene, Peter Adkins
PART I: IMAGINING CLIMATE
1. Virginia Woolf and Anticipations of the Anthropocene, Christina Alt
2. Cosmopolitan Anthropocene: The Convergence of Transnationalism and Climatic Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's The Years, Shinjini Chattopadhyay
PART II: MATTER AND MATERIALITIES
3. Outside the Anthropocene: The Subject of Virginia Woolf, Claire Colebrook
4. 'Mud and dung': Virginia Woolf's Environmental Mattering of War, Molly Volanth Hall
5. Following the Oil: Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Imperial Extractivism, Peter Adkins
PART III: WRITING EXTINCTION
6. Hearing Beyond Extinction: The Inhuman Comedy of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Rasheed Tazudeen
7. The Rat or the Flower? Decomposed Being(s) in the Holograph Draft of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Shilo McGiff
PART IV: MORE THAN HUMAN ENCOUNTERS
8. Darwinism, Dogs and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf, Saskia McCracken
9. Virginia Woolf's 'Bewildering World', Derek Ryan
PART V: OUTSIDERS, ASSEMBLAGES AND ACTIVISM
10. 'Suspending the Sky': Virginia Woolf and the Brazilian Indigenous Worldview of Ailton Krenak, Davi Pinho and Maria A. de Oliveria
11. Staging Collective Action for an Anthropocene Audience in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, Kelly Sultzbach
Index