Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Transnational Circulations

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Transnational Circulations enlarges our understanding of Virginia Woolf’s pacifist ideology and aesthetic response to the European wars by re-examining her writings and cultural contexts transnationally and comparatively through the complex interplay between modernism, politics, and aesthetics. The “transnational” paradigm that undergirds the book revolves around the idea of cosmopolitan cultural communities of writers, artists, and musicians worldwide who were intellectually involved in the war effort through the forging of pacifist cultural networks that arose as a form of resistance to war, militarism, and the rise of fascism. The essays presented in this volume engage with this type of mobile and circulatory pacifisms, calling attention to the intersections of modernist inquiries across the arts (art, music, literature, and performance) and transnational critical spaces (Asia, Europe, and the Americas) to show how the convergence of different cultural and linguistic horizons can significantly expand and enrich our understanding of Woolf’s modernist legacy.