Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin [Hardcover]

This book analyses the representation of the past and the practice of historiography in the fiction and critical writings of Virginia Woolf, and draws parallels between Woolf's historiographical imagination and the thought of Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher of history and key theorist of modernity.Acknowledgements.- Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in Constellation with Walter Benjamin.- Modernity, Modernism and the Past.- Theories of History, Models of Historiography.- Antiquity and Modernity: Jacob's Room and the 'Greek Myth'.- Historical Fictions, Fictional Fashions and Time: Orlando as the 'Angel of History'.- Natural History and Historical Nature in To the Lighthouse and Other Fiction.- Dreaming, History and the Visions of the Obscure in The Years.- This Stage of History: Between the Acts and the Destruction of Tradition.- A 'Common History': Anonymous Artists, Communal Collectivities.

Spiropoulous is the most significant full-length study on both Woolf and Benjamin ... She foregrounds the confluences between these two modernist icons, yet also highlights the tensions within their own oeuvres  between, most obviously, modernity and history and the present and the past. ... Spiropoulous very notion  or figuration  of constellations provides an illuminating means of exploring other relationships among writers. (Jeanne Dubino, Textual Practice, Vol 28 (4), July, 2014)

This inventive, skilfully constructed study also serves as a site of new potentialities, producing vivid new readings of the author's work ... presenting Spiropoulou as a critic in perfect alignment with her subject. (James Bailey, European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 15 (1), March, 2011)

 In bringing Virginia Woolf's histriographical techniques into constellation with Benjamin's thoughts on modernity and history, Spiropoulou offers a fresh approach to Woolf's engageml£&