Abstract

This book is well calculated to bring about the long awaited breakthrough in the appreciation of Virginia Woolf as an intellectual author. A.O. Frank argues that in Woolf's mature novels we find a coherent body of philosophical thought presented in lyrical prose which is nonetheless precisely argued. In sections of meticulously precise close reading Frank analyzes the complex mechanisms of "textual engineering" through which Woolf's ideas find expression. Educated in the German/Continental tradition of Aesthetics and Philosophy, the author believes that "for a thought to be thought out properly, it needs to be thought out philosophically." Speaking from a fruitfully intermediate position between British and Continental culture, she highlights and explicates Woolf's philosophical thought by analyzing carefully selected passages from existential, cosmological and epistemological texts by Nietzsche as well as Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and Derrida.