Call for Papers: Virginia Woolf and the World
“As a woman my country is the whole world.” Virginia Woolf’s declaration in Three Guineas gains new meaning in the context of her increasingly global reception and legacy. To capture the many Woolfian currents now circulating around the world, we are proposing a new volume, Virginia Woolf and the World, edited by Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University) and Paulina Pajak (Wroclaw University).
Virginia Woolf and the World most broadly considers the global responses Woolf’s work has provoked and her worldwide impact. We are seeking essays on Woolf’s reception, her influence on literature, and her presence in contemporary (bio)fiction around the world. We envision this volume as a comparative one, incorporating both transnational and local developments insofar as they epitomize Woolf’s global reception and legacy. The collection is intended to move beyond the “center” and “periphery” binary, searching for new models of Woolfian global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.
We are interested not only in how social, cultural and political differences shape the ways Woolf is read and interpreted in all four corners of the world, but also in the ways Woolf’s works influence local cultures. We invite papers on Woolf’s impact on her contemporary artists, as well as on post-Millennial writers worldwide. Essays that give space to previously underrepresented regions of Woolf’s reception studies are particularly welcome, and will be given special consideration.
We have been in contact with Edinburgh University Press (EUP), who have expressed enthusiastic interest in our project.
If you are interested in contributing to Virginia Woolf and the World, please email a 500-word abstract and a brief biographical note by April 30, 2017, to Jeanne Dubino (dubinoja@appstate.edu) and Paulina Pająk (paula.pajak@gmail.com). Our expectation is that the full version of the essay (5,000-8,000 words) will be completed a year later, by April 30, 2018. We plan to follow the 7th edition (not the 8th!) MLA style for in-text documentation and bibliography.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Woolf’s Global Reception
- Cultural, political and economic aspects of global Woolf
- New theoretical models for Woolfian global studies
- Transnational and local readings of Woolf’s oeuvre
- Woolf’s translations worldwide
- Woolf’s global and local audiences
- Woolf’s transmediality and adaptations in various regions
- Woolf’s works in transnational and local art
- Woolf’s crossing real and imaginary borders
- Internationalism in Woolf’s writings
- Transnational spaces and characters in Woolf’s works
- Woolf online
- Woolf as a global icon
- Woolf’s heritage industry around the world
Woolf’s Global Legacy
- Woolf’s formal and thematic impact on writers and thinkers worldwide
- Literature and art inspired by Woolf’s oeuvre around the world
- Rewritings of Woolf’s works in different cultures
- Woolf’s role in global and local circulation of feminist ideas
- Woolf as an inspiration for global and local civil rights movements
- Woolf’s role in shaping transatlantic and global modernism
- Hogarth Press translations
Woolf in Global (Bio)Fiction
- Woolf and her circle as characters in contemporary (bio)fiction
- Films, plays and performances relating to Woolf’s life
- Woolf’s biography in music and arts
- The Bloomsbury Group’s global afterlife
We very much hope that Virginia Woolf and the World will demonstrate the diversity of the worldwide reception andlegacy of Woolf’s oeuvre and the remarkable possibilities of transcultural exchange. As Woolf herself wrote, “Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.”