Ariane Mildenberg and Derek Ryan co-edit collections on Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, Europe, Peace

Dr Ariane Mildenberg, Senior Lecturer in Modernism and Dr Derek Ryan, Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature in the School of English, in the School of English have co-edited two volumes on Virginia Woolf entitled Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace (Clemson University Press, 2020), due to be published this month.

The first volume, Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Transnational Circulations, was co-edited by Dr Ariane Mildenberg and Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature, School of European Culture and Languages.

This volume enlarges our understanding of Virginia Woolf’s pacifist ideology and aesthetic response to the World Wars by re-examining her writings and cultural contexts transnationally and comparatively through the complex interplay between modernism, politics, and aesthetics. The “transnational” paradigm that undergirds this collection revolves around the idea of transnational cultural communities of writers, artists, and musicians worldwide who were intellectually involved in the war effort through the forging of pacifist cultural networks that arose as a form of resistance to war, militarism, and the rise of fascism. The book also offers philosophical approaches to notions of transnational pacifism, anti-war ethics, and decolonization. Presenting the perspectives of a range of significant scholars and critics, the chapters in this volume engage with mobile and circulatory pacifisms, highlighting the intersections of modernist inquiries across the arts (art, music, literature, and performance) and transnational critical spaces (Asia, Europe, and the Americas) to show how the convergence of different cultural and linguistic horizons can significantly expand and enrich our understanding of Woolf’s modernist legacy. As Jessica Berman (University of Maryland Baltimore County) puts it, in this ‘capacious and compelling collection . . . [t]he editors’ adept introduction situates the collection at the center of current discussions about transnationalism, the global South, and anti-imperialism, and refocuses us on Woolf’s antiwar writings through a transnational lens. . . . [T]here is much to learn here. A wonderful new addition to Woolf scholarship!’

For more details, please see the publisher’s pages here:
https://libraries.clemson.edu/press/books/virginia-woolf-europe-and-peace/

and here:
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/52687/

The second volume, entitled Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory, is co-edited by Dr Peter Adkins, Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Dr Derek Ryan, Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature.

This volume asks how Woolf conceptualized peace by exploring the various experimental forms she created in response to war and violence. Comprised of fifteen chapters by an international array of leading and emerging scholars, this book both draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s modernist aesthetic and draws on various critical frameworks for reading her work, in order to deepen our understanding of her writing about the politics of war, ethics, feminism, class, animality, and European culture. The chapters collected here look at how we might re-read Woolf and her contemporaries in the light of theoretical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicize these frameworks through Woolf’s own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In the words of Clara Jones (King’s College London), the book ‘engage[s] with Woolf’s multi-faceted pacifism with dexterity and flair. The Woolf to emerge in this collection is a theorist of peace and a serious thinker about community, cooperation, and intersubjective relations of all kinds—this is the Woolf we most need today.’

For more details, please see the publisher’s pages here:
https://libraries.clemson.edu/press/books/virginia-woolf-europe-and-peace-2/

and here:
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/52686/