Virginia Woolf, Empire and race

Carr, Helen

doi:10.1017/ccol9780521896948.010

Cited by 20 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…India is a signifying absence in Virginia Woolf's writings: never directly experienced, but constitutive of persons, histories and imagined locations. Woolf's references to India are usually explained by the fact of her family's long‐standing record of service to the Empire—a record shared, in that era, with other middle and upper‐class families (Carr, 2010, p. 198). Such families also included more disreputable members who had made their livings in India.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Filamentary relations’: Virginia Woolf and India

Chaudhuri

2020

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Woolf's own phrase, 'filamentary relations', referring to threads or filaments, 'webs of nerve', that reach out and touch, but may also snap and break, offers a better metaphor for Woolf's links with India than notions of filiation or affiliation. This essay traces the phrase 'filaments of the nerve' to Alexander Bain's The Senses and the Intellect (1855), the first text to mention a 'stream of consciousness'. I use the trope of the filament to explore the references to India that contextualize characters and histories in Woolf's work, the transnational modernist and anti-imperial print networks within which she was placed and the threads of connection that Indian writers work into their own texts. But just as the affective range of Woolf's textual filaments is limited by location and ideology, there are breaks and ruptures, too, in the networks of transnational modernism. Nevertheless, postcolonial Indian writers can be seen to look back at Woolf through lines of textual relation, filaments that form a postmodern web of connections. The essay offers a reading of responses to Woolf by Indian novelists across three generations:

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%