A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of “long modernism.”

In recent decades, Virginia Woolf’s contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called “odd affinities” that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

Elizabeth Abel is the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis and Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow and the editor or coeditor of four collections, most recently, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Woolf Tracks

Part I: Woolf’s Room in African American Modernism
Chapter 1: Mrs. Dalloway in Harlem: Passing’s Contending Modernisms
Chapter 2: The Smashed Mosaic: Woolf’s Traces in Baldwin’s Oeuvre

Part II: Woolf’s Refuge in Late European Modernism
Chapter 3: Light Rooms: Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, and the Mediums of Maternal Mourning
Chapter 4: Invisible Subjects: Woolf’s Flickering in Sebald’s Austerlitz

Afterword: Vibrations and Visibility

List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index