Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory
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A01=Derek Ryan
Animal
animal studies
Author_Derek Ryan
Category=DSA
Category=DSBH
Contemporary Theory
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Gilles Deleuze
Modernism
Posthumanism
Virginia Woolf
Product details
- ISBN 9780748676439
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 17 Mar 2013
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Explores Woolf’s writing alongside Deleuze’s philosophy and new materialist theories of ‘sex’, ‘animal’, and ‘life’
How does Virginia Woolf conceptualise the material world? In what ways has Woolf’s modernism affected understandings of materiality, and what new perspectives does she offer contemporary theoretical debates? Derek Ryan demonstrates how materiality is theorised in Woolf’s writings by focusing on the connections she makes between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter. Through close readings of texts including To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, Flush, and ‘Sketch of the Past’, he details the fresh insights Woolf provides into issues concerning the natural world, sexual difference, sexuality, animality, and life itself.
Ryan opens up Woolf studies to new theoretical paradigms by placing Woolf in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze – who cites her modernist aesthetics as exemplary of some of his most important philosophical concepts – as well as eminent contemporary theorists including Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett, all of whom have influenced the recent critical turn towards new materialisms. Locating theory within Woolf’s writing as well as locating Woolf within theory, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life brings her modernism firmly into to the foreground of current debates in literary studies, feminist philosophy, queer theory, animal studies and posthumanities.
Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Kent and author of Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (2022), Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015) and Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (2013). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals (2023) and co-editor of several volumes including Cross-Channel Modernisms (2020), Reading Literary Animals (2019) and The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018). He is Literature Subject Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography.
