Odd Affinities

A new reading of Virginia Woolf in the context of “long modernism.” In recent decades, Virginia Woolf’s contribution to literary history has been located primarily within a female tradition. Elizabeth Abel dislodges Woolf from her iconic place within this tradition to uncover her shadowy presence in other literary genealogies. Abel elicits unexpected echoes of Woolf in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. By mapping the wayward paths of what Woolf called “odd affinities” that traverse the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Abel offers a new account of the arc of Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy constituted by her elusive and shifting presence. Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and African American studies.

“What a joy it is to think alongside Elizabeth Abel, our most brilliant critic of Virginia Woolf’s fiction. A work of gentle genius, Odd Affinities brims with startling readings of Woolf’s hidden presence in the writings of Larsen, Baldwin, Barthes, and Sebald. It is a delight to agree with Abel, and a delight to disagree with her too, as the very act of disagreement surfaces other odd affinities. I will return to this astonishing book again and again.”, “Challenging caricatures of Woolf as an insular British writer, Elizabeth Abel’s strikingly original case studies show how the work of this touchstone figure inspires artists across race, class, sex, gender, national, and generational differences and resonates at deep levels in their imaginative and theoretical writings. Odd Affinities captures fascinating sotto voce literary conversations—the remarkable fruits of Abel’s free, organic adventure in scholarly reading—and enhances our understanding of literary influence as such.”, “Elizabeth Abel’s startling mode of literary genealogy reveals how Woolf’s modernist work, in both content and form, shaped some of the most significant literature of the twentieth century. Odd Affinities does not simply bring Woolf’s writing into dialogue with Larsen, Baldwin, Barthes, and Sebald; it invites us to listen to the whispered conversations her work was already having with these writers as they produced their major works, and we are left wondering how and why we missed the Woolfian influence on these diverse oeuvres for so long.”

Elizabeth Abel is the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis and Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow and the editor or coeditor of four collections, most recently, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism.