Unwriting and Rewriting History and Literary History: Virginia Woolf’s Fictions and Essays

The aim of this talk is to introduce the audience to Woolf’s historical thought seen from the vantage point of the past and contemporary historiographical discourses that she responded to; to offer a new vision of Woolf as a literary historian essentially interested in the textuality of history – its readability and intelligibility, what it writes, unwrites, leaves unfinished and excludes; and to uncover the specific coherence of her history of nineteenth-century women’s literature beyond its apparent heterogeneity and contradictory impulses.