Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in the Anthropocene

This introduction theorises what it means to read Virginia Woolf as a writer of the Anthropocene. It does so initially by situating Woolf within the early twentieth century’s growing sense of both humanity’s power to shape the planet and its own precarity as a species. Looking at her description of the 1927 total solar eclipse and To the Lighthouse, this chapter shows how Woolf was highly attuned to rapid shifts in how the planet was being conceptualised and understood, as well as the material transformations taking place around her. The chapter then explores how Woolf theorises what it means to be a reader, critic and writer in the Anthropocene, looking at how her essays and reviews turn to the nonhuman world in their conceptualisation of literary aesthetics and cultural history. Woolf is shown to be not only a writer of the Anthropocene epoch, but a theorist too. The chapter then examines how Woolf’s ecological sensibilities were recognised by critics long before the environmental turn within modernist studies. Offering an account of Woolf criticism from the 1980s to the present, it charts how Woolf’s ecocritical reception has kept apace with developments in the field. This section concludes with summaries of the subsequent chapters in the volume.