Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Peter Adkins (Lecturer in Modernist Literature, University of Edinburgh)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399516693

ISBN 10:   1399516698
Pages:   296
Publication Date:   31 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Language:   English

Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Series Preface Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Anthropocene, Peter Adkins PART I: IMAGINING CLIMATE 1. Virginia Woolf and Anticipations of the Anthropocene, Christina Alt 2. Cosmopolitan Anthropocene: The Convergence of Transnationalism and Climatic Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Shinjini Chattopadhyay PART II: MATTER AND MATERIALITIES 3. Outside the Anthropocene: The Subject of Virginia Woolf, Claire Colebrook 4. ‘Mud and dung’: Virginia Woolf’s Environmental Mattering of War, Molly Volanth Hall 5. Following the Oil: Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Imperial Extractivism, Peter Adkins PART III: WRITING EXTINCTION 6. Hearing Beyond Extinction: The Inhuman Comedy of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Rasheed Tazudeen 7. The Rat or the Flower? Decomposed Being(s) in the Holograph Draft of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Shilo McGiff PART IV: MORE THAN HUMAN ENCOUNTERS 8. Darwinism, Dogs and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf, Saskia McCracken 9. Virginia Woolf’s ‘Bewildering World’, Derek Ryan PART V: OUTSIDERS, ASSEMBLAGES AND ACTIVISM 10. ‘Suspending the Sky’: Virginia Woolf and the Brazilian Indigenous Worldview of Ailton Krenak, Davi Pinho and Maria A. de Oliveria 11. Staging Collective Action for an Anthropocene Audience in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Kelly Sultzbach Index

Reviews

This valuable collection assesses Woolf's potential to address the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene through her distinct feminist modernism. Essays from both veteran and more recent critics address useful angles, including climate change, extraction of resources, materialist visions of extinction, and new sources for interspecies, planetary communication and collaboration. -- Bonnie Kime Scott, San Diego State University These rich, intensive and impressive pieces of work force us to recognise how much more radical and prophetic Virginia Woolf’s work really is than has been understood. This excellent collection explores how Woolf anticipated present concerns, setting humans against the planet’s deep history and entangled within vast nonhuman forces that haunt our pretensions and threaten disaster. -- Louise Westling, University of Oregon

In Kirkyard Romanticism, Sharp transcends the national to make a significant contribution to nationhood theory, as well as 19th-century Scottish literature and politics. Summing Up: Highly recommended. --J. Walker, emeritus, Queen's University at Kingston ""CHOICE"" These rich, intensive and impressive pieces of work force us to recognise how much more radical and prophetic Virginia Woolf's work really is than has been understood. This excellent collection explores how Woolf anticipated present concerns, setting humans against the planet's deep history and entangled within vast nonhuman forces that haunt our pretensions and threaten disaster. --Louise Westling, University of Oregon This valuable collection assesses Woolf's potential to address the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene through her distinct feminist modernism. Essays from both veteran and more recent critics address useful angles, including climate change, extraction of resources, materialist visions of extinction, and new sources for interspecies, planetary communication and collaboration. --Bonnie Kime Scott, San Diego State University

Author Information

Peter Adkins is Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (2022) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (2020). He has written widely on modernism, the environment and posthumanism.

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