Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys

Examines the life-affirming and enchanting aspects of Woolf’s and Rhys’s modernism with feminist, affect and new materialist theories

• Develops a life-affirming reading of modernism by positioning a concept of strange intimacy as an attachment to life
• Contributes to new modernist studies by exploring transnational modernism and female-identified authors
• Explores the commonality between modernist and postcolonial literature by focusing on life-affirming intimacies
• Adds a crucial female author, Hélène Cixous, to the male canon in the philosophical strand of affect theory which usually draws heavily from the work of Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, and Massumi
• Explores the continuity between poststructural feminist theories and affect and new materialist theories by reading Cixous with the latter two theories in mind

This book explores how the novels by Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys – To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), Between the Acts (1941), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) – maintain an attachment to and love for life amid disenchanting times of war and social change. Drawing from Woolf’s and Rhys’s personal writings and fictions, Talviste demonstrates that Woolf and Rhys locate this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective and oddly intimate moments that function as cracks in the dominant patriarchal and imperial ideologies of Woolf’s and Rhys’s times. To theorise strange intimacy, this monograph rethinks the feminist works of Hélène Cixous, especially her attention to materiality, affect and embodiment, in the light of contemporary affect studies and new materialism.