Introduction
Introduction
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”.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury Group, Armistice, Weak Theory, Literary Pacifism, World War One, World War Two, Aesthetics, Critical Theory
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
