This book analyses the representation of the past and the practice of historiography in the fiction and critical writings of Virginia Woolf, and draws parallels between Woolf's historiographical imagination and the thought of Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher of history and key theorist of modernity.

Autorentext

Angeliki Spiropoulou holds a PhD from the University of Sussex, UK. She is Lecturer in Modern European Literature and Theory at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. Her recent publications include: Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Rereading Texts (co-editor, Bern 2002); Contemporary Greek Fiction: International Orientations and Crossings (co-editor, Athens 2002); Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity (editor, Athens 2007) and History of European Literature: 18th-20th C (co-author, Patras 2008).

Inhalt
Acknowledgements.- Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in Constellation with Walter Benjamin.- Modernity, Modernism and the Past.- Theories of History, Models of Historiography.- Antiquity and Modernity: Jacob's Room and the 'Greek Myth'.- Historical Fictions, Fictional Fashions and Time: Orlando as the 'Angel of History'.- Natural History and Historical Nature in To the Lighthouse and Other Fiction.- Dreaming, History and the Visions of the Obscure in The Years.- This Stage of History: Between the Acts and the Destruction of Tradition.- A 'Common History': Anonymous Artists, Communal Collectivities.