The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature contributes to the ongoing and urgent project to situate Woolf in conversation with both contemporary and global contexts. Expanding on Brenda Silver's Virginia Woolf Icon (1999), the editors and contributors to this collection explore the complexities of Woolf's status as a global, transnational icon, in terms of both her reception and her influence. This volume of twenty-three essays is shaped by the convergence of two paradigms of planetarity and globality, an ecocritical model that encompasses the nonhuman, inspired by Susan Stanford Friedman's Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (2015), and a sociopolitical gesture that challenges the domination of the Global North, inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2003). The editors of this volume, Jeanne Dubino, Paulina Pająk, Catherine W. Hollis, Celiese Lypka, and Vara Neverow, display an impressive understanding of the intellectual and political stakes of studies in global literature and the institutionally marginalized discipline of comparative literature, which is refreshing to see emerging within scholarly communities concerned with British authors. Indeed, the entire aim and purpose of this volume is to be praised.
The volume offers chapters focused on how Woolf has been received and transformed in diverse cultures, as well as chapters about how Woolf's works have inspired artists from all over the world, including Estonia, Brazil, Uruguay, Romania, Australia, China, Germany, and the German Democratic Republic, Argentina, Russia, Egypt, Italy, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Japan, Poland, and several others. Contributors explore the varied responses and approaches to Woolf's work by critics, translators, academics, publishers, editors, common readers, and artists. Lending unity to the wide range of cultures and literary traditions represented are recurring threads of feminism and sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, and politics and the environment. Near the end of the introduction, three useful tables vividly illustrate the extent of Woolf's reach beyond Europe and North America, evidenced in the number of editions of Woolf's works published in multiple languages between 1926 and 2020, websites devoted to Woolf, and international publications compiled in the MLA International Bibliography as of 2020.
The collection is welcome for a number of reasons. First, for scholars and students of modern British literature the book acts as a kind of introduction to twentieth-century global literary culture through the focused lens of Woolf's global reception. The collection covers every continent, challenging the dominance of the Global North and Global West in world literary studies. Approaching global literature can feel intimidating to scholars and students trained in English or American studies. This volume provides fascinating snapshots of modern and contemporary literary history in very particular local forms, exposing Woolf scholars and students to a wide range of world literatures in accessible and intriguing ways. The book opens up like a jewel box, revealing small windows into complex literary histories that inspire curiosity in readers. I truly enjoyed reading the essays in this collection and found many intriguing literary worlds that were new to me.
Many of the essays exemplify the ways in which Woolf's cosmofeminism, a term coined by Friedman (Susan Stanford Friedman, “Wartime Cosmopolitanism: Cosmofeminism in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 32, no. 1 [2013]: 23–52) to describe Woolf's pacifist-feminist critique of the wars of nation-states and a utopian longing for peace, makes her a central figure of world literature. At the same time, the collection works to de-center Woolf by situating her within the “transnational feminist networks” of “planetary feminism” (332), networks in which Woolf is but one node. The essays also dis-unify Woolf in their repeated emphasis on the many Virginia Woolfs that have been presented to readers around the world at different moments, and the changing perceptions and receptions of Woolf as different works became available, different types of editions were sold, and translation practices changed. As several contributors note, often the first translations of Woolf's works that were available reinforced contemporary assumptions or popular ideological positions of the cultures in which they were published, while later editions and translations conveyed Woolf's style more accurately.
One of the unexpected and sad highlights of the collection for Woolf scholars will be Suzanne Bellamy's essay on the reception of Virginia Woolf and modernism in early twentieth-century Australia, the last Bellamy published before her untimely death in 2022. As always, Bellamy's essay is meticulously researched and eloquently argued. Surveying book sales, library records, and reviews, Bellamy finds a complexly engaged reading public that demonstrates a tension “between the push towards creating a postcolonial national literature and the pull towards placing Australian literature in an international context” (64). Many essays explore the complications of women reader-authors negotiating a canonical representative of Englishness, European modernism, and feminism, both from the perspective of a literary tradition struggling with the outsized influence of European literary modernism and from an internationalist feminist, pacifist, and anti-fascist perspective.
This beautiful tapestry of thoughtful, well-researched, original essays de-familiarizes Woolf, making her fresh and calling into question received wisdom about her status in world literature. By placing Woolf in conversation with so many thinkers, new Woolfs emerge in a kaleidoscopic panoply.
