Introduction

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781949979374.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-8

Author(s):

Peter Adkins ◽

Derek Ryan

Keyword(s):

War And Peace ◽

Bloomsbury Group ◽

Literary Responses ◽

New Ideas ◽

Modernist Studies

Beginning with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s response to the 1918 armistice and her fictional reimagining of it in her novel The Years, this introduction sets out the importance of questions of peace and Europe to Woolf’s practices as a writer. Situating Woolf within broader literary responses to questions of war and peace, including those who supported war, such as H.G. Wells, and her involvement with the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, we explore Woolf’s legacy as a writer whose aesthetical innovations and theoretical interventions aimed to bring new ideas of peaceful co-existence into being. Surveying the critical legacy of Woolf as a theorist of war and of violence, we suggest that the recent turn to “weak theory” within modernist studies can benefit from Woolf’s literary pacifism and her willingness to embrace “the subjunctive, the speculative, and the counterfactual”.

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Sitwell, Edith (1887–1964)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1102-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Claire Barber

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Work ◽

Family Dynamic ◽

Dysfunctional Family ◽

Bloomsbury Group ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Literary Salon ◽

Dylan Thomas ◽

Modernist Studies

Dame Edith Sitwell was an experimental poet known for her eccentric behavior and aesthetics. A skillfully controlled reading voice, along with dramatic clothes and jewelry, led to her widespread recognition as an exceptional performer. Though she has received little attention within modernist studies, she significantly influenced the development of twentieth-century art with literary productions like Façade (1922) and her patronage of other artists, including Dylan Thomas. Her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell were two of her closest companions and collaborators. With them, she endeavored to build an avant-garde artistic society rivaling the Bloomsbury Group. Born into the British aristocracy, Sitwell had a strained relationship with her parents, Sir George and Lady Ida Sitwell, daughter of the Earl of Londesborough. A tall girl with an aquiline nose and hooded eyes, Sitwell did not conform to their idea of beauty, so her parents forced her to wear metal appliances to correct her spine and nose—an experience described in her autobiography, Taken Care Of (1965). Lady Sitwell’s trial for fraud exacerbated this dysfunctional family dynamic during the same year in which Edith published her first literary work, The Mother and Other Poems (1915). However, she had already moved to London in 1914 with former governess Helen Rootham, where she established a literary salon in austere rooms at Pembridge Mansions.

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Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace

10.3828/liverpool/9781949979374.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Animal Studies ◽

Peace Studies ◽

War And Peace ◽

Bloomsbury Group ◽

European Culture ◽

Second World

From the “prying,” “insidious” “fingers of the European War” that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to the call to “think peace into existence” during the Blitz in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” questions of war and peace pervade the writings of Virginia Woolf. This volume asks how Woolf conceptualised 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 new theoretical and aesthetical innovations, such as peace studies, post-critique, queer theory, and animal studies. It also asks how we might historicise these frameworks through Woolf’s own engagement with the First and Second World Wars, while also bringing her writings on peace into dialogue with those of others in the Bloomsbury Group. In doing so, this volume reassesses the role of Europe and peace in Woolf’s work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.

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Socialism and international relations: Bernard Shaw's reflections on war and peace

Review of International Studies ◽

10.1017/s0260210500116298 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 253-268

Author(s):

Gareth Griffith

Keyword(s):

International Relations ◽

Strict Sense ◽

War And Peace ◽

British Labour ◽

New Ideas ◽

Intellectual Context ◽

Bernard Shaw ◽

The Great War ◽

Fabian Society ◽

Crucial Part

Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is usually thought of as a playwright: author of such works as St. Joan and Major Barbara; winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. What is often overlooked is that he first achieved prominence in public life as a leading member of the Fabian Society, advocating a piecemeal, reformist, evolutionary brand of socialism which he considered more appropriate to the British political tradition than revolutionary Marxism. The Fabian Society—largely through the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb—is often credited with having played a crucial part in the formation of the welfare state, and more generally it is looked upon as the major source of new ideas and policies in the British Labour Movement. Shaw served on the Society's executive committee for over two decades, acting as resident propagandist and original thinker, often tackling neglected themes. It was in this way that he developed an interest in international relations. He eventually resigned from the executive in 1911, seeking inter alia greater freedom to express his views on world events. His thoughts on the Great War, therefore, cannot be read as statements of Fabian doctrine in any strict sense. Nevertheless, his association with the Society remained close enough for those thoughts to be seen as belonging to the broadly Fabian school of social democracy. This, in essence, was the intellectual context within which he operated.

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