With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for scholars and graduate students. Feminist to the core, each chapter examines an aspect of Woolf’s achievement and legacy. Each contribution offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote prolifically and experimentally. In all she wrote and did, she strove for the rights of women artists: she was a feminist. This volume’s six parts take her feminism and her experiments in language as foundational to her legacy: the opening Part I has a biographical focus; then the chapters in Part II examine her career, holistically and chronologically; Part III offers more detail on the extent of her experimental and aesthetic practices, taking aspects of her innovation across multiple genres, examining each along the span of her career; Part IV invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the TLS and Part V ‘Contexts’ moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with expectations of class and gender, the natural world, as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. Finally, ‘Afterlives’ demonstrates the many ways Woolf’s reputation continues to grow, across the globe, and across media, in ideas and in artistic expression. Chapters on Woolf’s engagement with feminism and suffrage are followed by chapters on Woolf’s posthumous influence on conversations around queer and feminist theory. Of particular note is that chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.
Virginia Woolf and photography