Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy

Revisiting Virginia Woolf's most experimental texts, Elsa Hoegberg explores how Woolf's writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Hoegberg's readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to be not just affective connections with loved ones, but primarily those painful encounters which unsettle our knowledge of who we are and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy demonstrates how this troubling and thought-provoking notion of intimacy is central to Woolf's ethical and political stance against violence, patriotism and fascism. Drawing on contemporary theory - including the works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva - it reads Woolf as a writer and political thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to debates around intimacy, power and vulnerability in contemporary theory.