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Philosophical Approaches to Virginia Woolf

Guest Editors: Keren Gorodeisky (Auburn), Sean T. Murphy (Southern Utah), & Kenny Walden (Dartmouth)

Virginia Woolf had a long and fruitful engagement with philosophy. Her relationships with individual philosophers, her attraction to certain philosophical ideas, and her wrestling with philosophical texts alongside the rest of the Bloomsbury group are well-documented. Yet, serious engagement with the philosophical depth and originality of her fiction and critical essays is not what it could be. Given Woolf’s sustained and pathbreaking work on urgent questions at the center of philosophy and philosophical aesthetics – like the experience of selfhood, the nature of subjectivity, the texture of our relations to each other, our existence in nature and time, the political situation of modernity, the centrality of character in fiction, the challenge of aesthetically representing a person, the nature of pictures, the difference between painting and narrative art – this lacuna is deplorable. This special issue aims to address this lacuna and give Woolf’s philosophical depth its due in academic philosophical discussions.

The guest editors encourage prospective authors to approach Woolf in an open, sensitive, and responsive spirit. We wish to avoid rushing to conclusions about Woolf’s status as a ‘philosophical novelist’; and discourage attempts to ‘pluck’ philosophy from the lines of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, The Common Readers, and so on. Rather, we hope to follow in Stuart Hampshire’s footsteps when he writes that it is a mistake to think of Woolf’s novels as ‘a continuing inquiry into some independently recognized problem’.

The guest editors are happy to accept submissions on any aspect of Woolf’s written work: novels, short stories, essays, diaries, and so on. They are also excited to receive submissions that range over different philosophical topics and approach Woolf from a variety of methodological orientations. Lastly, since philosophy nowadays seems to many as literature did to Woolf and contemporaries – overworked, worn out, maybe even moribund – the guest editors are particularly keen to read essays that, while remaining accessible to readers, attempt modest reinventions of the form following Woolf’s own example.

We invite papers exploring themes in Woolf including, but not limited to:

• The experience of selfhood
• The nature of subjectivity
• The texture of our relations to each other
• Our existence in nature and time
• The political situation of modernity
• The centrality of character in fiction
• The challenge of aesthetically representing a person
• The nature of pictures
• The difference between painting and narrative art

Papers should conform to the usual BJA requirements and be submitted for consideration through the BJA submissions site by April 20, 2027. Any queries should be addressed to the editors: Paloma Atencia Linares (patencia@fsof.uned.es) & Derek Matravers (derek.matravers@open.ac.uk).