Virginia Woolf and Futurity
£90.00
About this book
Re-evaluates the writings of Virginia Woolf through the lens of futurity
- Draws on previously underexamined or unexamined archival documents by Woolf
- Reads Woolf alongside a range of twentieth century and contemporary philosophers
- Examines futurity in Woolf’s writing through a variety of theoretical approaches
- Offers a novel reading of Woolf with the works of Ernst Bloch
How did Virginia Woolf conceive of the future, of that which is to come? Joshua Phillips argues that Woolf had a lifelong interest in questions of the future – of how people, things, objects and words endure into an unknown futurity, and in more practical questions of how to make the future a better place, free from the strictures of patriarchy and militarism. Virginia Woolf and Futurity demonstrates how these questions recur across Woolf’s novels and short stories, from her earliest writings to the final drafts which she left unfinished at the end of her life, and how questions of futurity find multivalent and paradoxical forms throughout her writing.
Reviews
A brilliant contribution to our understanding of Woolf as a profoundly important philosophical thinker. Phillips’s often startling textual juxtapositions consider ethics, heterotopias, utopias, animal knowledge and more strung along a robust thread of reparative reading to consider what possibilities inhere in Woolf’s lifelong commentary on futurity.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Darkness and Futurity
1. Virginia Woolf the Utopian?
2. Education, Hope and Heterotopia
3. Writing the Future of Writing
4. The Future-Oriented Politics of Noise
5. Virginia Woolf at the Limits of the Human
6. The Work of Anonymity
Coda: Open-Ended
Bibliography
Index