Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (Virginia Woolf – Variations)

by: Peter Adkins (Editor)

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Edition: 1st

Publication Date: 2024/6/30

Language: English

Print Length: 296 pages

ISBN-10: 139951668X

ISBN-13: 9781399516686

Book Description

The first half of the twentieth century was a period of accelerated resource extraction, industrial intensification and tipping points in pollution levels, hastening the emergence of an epoch in which humans are the key drivers of planetary change. Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene situates Woolf’s oeuvre as an important body of work within the literary history of our new planetary period, showing how her fiction and non-fiction engages with questions around climate change, environmental politics, imperial extractivism, eco-philosophy, species difference, natural history and extinction. Bringing together leading and emergent scholars, this collection recognises Woolf as a writer who was profoundly influenced by ecological and environmental questions throughout her life. It brings to light how Woolf responded to the environmental changes of her time and illuminates how her literary innovations continue to offer compelling ways of imagining the nonhuman and the planetary in our present moment.

About the Author

The first half of the twentieth century was a period of accelerated resource extraction, industrial intensification and tipping points in pollution levels, hastening the emergence of an epoch in which humans are the key drivers of planetary change. Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene situates Woolf’s oeuvre as an important body of work within the literary history of our new planetary period, showing how her fiction and non-fiction engages with questions around climate change, environmental politics, imperial extractivism, eco-philosophy, species difference, natural history and extinction. Bringing together leading and emergent scholars, this collection recognises Woolf as a writer who was profoundly influenced by ecological and environmental questions throughout her life. It brings to light how Woolf responded to the environmental changes of her time and illuminates how her literary innovations continue to offer compelling ways of imagining the nonhuman and the planetary in our present moment.