The Ecology of English Time
At a time when the English landscape was mobilized—both materially and in the cultural imagination—for fighting the Second World War, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fashioned their most ‘English’ works, Between the Acts (1941) and Four Quartets (1935–42) respectively. Building on extant scholarship surrounding the writers’ temporal and environmental concerns, Chapter 6 provides an alternative account of the writers’ supposed national insularity as one inflected by pacifist and internationalist motivations. Tracing the study of ecology as it was historically intertwined with cosmopolitical inquiry in the twentieth century, the chapter reveals ways in which the writers’ late modernist works uphold Anglocentric exceptionalism but, also, provide diversified understandings of time and place to convey international belonging.