Voyages Out, Voyages Home

The Eleventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf was the first to be held outside the United States. This voyage across the Atlantic was the stimulus for an exploration of themes of voyaging in Woolf’s works, from her interests in travel and cross-cultural encounters to her imaginative voyages between texts and genres . . . and the subsequent voyages her texts have made into the work of others.

Published nine years after the conference, this selection of papers by international scholars fills a gap in the chronicles of the Woolf conference. For this reason, several papers feature an Afterword outlining developments in research since 2001, and the book also includes a “Bibliography of Publications Arising from the Conference,” facilitating access to research presented at Bangor but published elsewhere. Another special feature of the volume is the tribute to one of the keynote speakers, Julia Briggs, who died in 2007, in which Beth Rigel Daugherty communicates the gratitude of the scholarly community for Julia’s many contributions to Woolf studies. This welcome publication is a fitting record of our collective voyage as Woolf scholars.