From the \u201cprying,\u201d \u201cinsidious\u201d \u201cfingers of the European War\u201d that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway<\/i> to the call to \u201cthink peace into existence\u201d during the Blitz in \u201cThoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s work and opens up new ways of reading her oeuvre.<\/p>\n