| Title: |
Virginia Woolf and the Pageant of History |
| Authors: |
Shackleton, David |
| Source: |
British Modernism and the Anthropocene ; page 122-157 ; ISBN 0192857746 9780192857743 9780191948626 |
| Publisher Information: |
Oxford University PressOxford |
| Publication Year: |
2023 |
| Description: |
Chapter 4 argues that Virginia Woolf’s fiction provides a model for rethinking agency in the Anthropocene. Drawing attention to her abiding interest in the way that history is written, this chapter compares To the Lighthouse (1927) to the experimental historiography of the Annales school. Woolf and the Annalistes shared a distaste for ‘great men’ conceptions of history, and both turned to different scales and types of time to displace emphasis from individuals and events. Yet whereas the Annalistes rejected narrative as unsuitable for history on medium and long timescales, Woolf experimented with quasi-plots to convey a sense of history as composed of multiple processes unfolding at different speeds and on different scales. The chapter then turns to Between the Acts (1940), in which Woolf uses the affordances of drama to explore the relationship between human and natural history at a time of historical crisis. Throughout, Woolf’s fiction achieves what might be called a ‘feminist scale critique’: her narrative experiments with scale unsettle familiar conceptions of human agency, and displace ‘great men’ from the centre of history and fiction. Her representations of agency contrast markedly with those of H. G. Wells, and might be redeployed to counteract recent masculinist strains of Anthropocene discourse. |
| Document Type: |
book part |
| Language: |
English |
| ISBN: |
978-0-19-285774-3; 978-0-19-194862-6; 0-19-285774-6; 0-19-194862-4 |
| DOI: |
10.1093/oso/9780192857743.003.0005 |
| Availability: |
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192857743.003.0005; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/51067666/oso-9780192857743-chapter-5.pdf |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.71F62D5D |
| Database: |
BASE |