Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science
The Aesthetics of Astronomy

This book investigates how advances in astronomy in the early twentieth century had a shaping effect on Woolf's literature.

Holly Henry (Author)

9780521812979, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 February 2003

224 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

Review of the paperback: 'This enthralling and well-researched book sets Virginia Woolf and her work in the context of popular imaginings of astronomy, relativity, politics and social justice during the first third of the twentieth century. A particular strength of Holly Henry's work is her thoroughgoing archival research into James Jeans's papers and papers concerned with Edwin Hubble.' Virginia Woolf Bulletin

Holly Henry investigates how advances in astronomy in the early twentieth century had a shaping effect on Woolf's literature and aesthetics as well as on the work of modernist British writers including Vita Sackville-West, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Bertrand Russell, and T. S. Eliot. The 1920s and 30s witnessed a pervasive public fascination with astronomy that extended from the US, where Edwin Hubble in 1923 definitively determined that entire galaxies existed beyond the Milky Way, to England, where London's intellectuals discussed Sir James Jeans's popular astronomy books and the newly explored expanses of space. In re-evaluating the cultural context out of which Modernism emerged, Henry contends that Woolf, through her own fascination with astronomy, formulated a global vision that helped shape her fiction and her pacifist politics. Henry's study includes examinations of scientific and literary archival material and sheds light on Woolf's texts and recent re-evaluations of Modernism.

List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
Introduction: formulating a global aesthetic
1. Stars and nebulae in popular culture
2. From Edwin Hubble's telescope to Virginia Woolf's 'searchlight'
3. 'Solid objects in a solid universe': the globe and Woolf's deployment of multiple perspectives
4. 'Talk about the riddle of the universe': traversing the discourses of science and art in The Waves
5. From galactic expanses to earth: Woolf and Stapledon envision new worlds
6. Woolf's global vision: Three Guineas and the politics of science
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB]