Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ayres, Jackson

Titel

THE PLANES MADE ONE THINK: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S BETWEEN THE ACTS AND INVASION LITERATURE

Ist Teil von

• Modern fiction studies, 2017-12, Vol.63 (4), p.628-650

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This essay reads Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) alongside the relatively underread genre of invasion fiction. Following modernist studies' recent turn toward interwar Britain's cultural anticipation of catastrophe, the essay foregrounds how Woolf's assumption of an imminent German invasion pervades her final novel. Juxtaposing Woolf's invasion motif with invasion literature reveals a shared skepticism toward English liberalism. Reading Acts in light of invasion clarifies Woolf's suspicion that liberalism is not only susceptible to but in fact fosters its destruction from invasion. Woolf's ambivalence toward her liberalism in the face of invasion, moreover, is inherited by postwar liberal authors.