Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature

This book examines Virginia Woolf's interest and understanding of natural history and how it is reflected in her works.

Christina Alt (Author)

9780521196550, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 July 2010

240 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.6 cm, 0.52 kg

'This invaluable book fleshes out Virginia Woolf's immersion in the life sciences from her Victorian childhood to her modernist fascination with the new fields of ecology and ethology … Alt provides a full delineation of late Victorian natural history in its peculiarly British conservatism and resistance to the kind of institutional science practiced on the Continent.' Louise Westling, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism

Reflecting the modernist fascination with science, Virginia Woolf's representations of nature are informed by a wide-ranging interest in contemporary developments in the life sciences. Christina Alt analyses Woolf's responses to disciplines ranging from taxonomy and the new biology of the laboratory to ethology and ecology and illustrates how Woolf drew on the methods and objectives of the contemporary life sciences to describe her own literary experiments. Through the examination of Woolf's engagement with shifting approaches to the study of nature, this work covers new ground in Woolf studies and makes an important contribution to the understanding of modernist exchanges between literature and science.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. The natural history tradition
2. The modern life sciences
3. 'To pin through the body with a name': Virginia Woolf and the taxonomic tradition
4. Laboratory coats and field glasses: Virginia Woolf and the modern study of nature
5. Representing 'the manner of our seeing': literary experimentation and scientific analogy
Bibliography
Notes.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]