Unwriting and Rewriting History and Literary History: Woolf’s Fictions and Essays

As part of the « Woolf Seminar » series of the Turkish Virginia Woolf Society, Anne Besnault will be giving a talk on the 29th of September at 7 pm (Turkey Time). You can get your ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unwriting-and-rewriting-historyliterary-history-woolfs-fictions-essays-tickets-718134829607?aff=oddtdtcreator

The aim of Anne Besnault’s talk is to introduce the audience to Woolf’s historical thought seen from the vantage point of the past and contemporary historiographical discourses that she responded to; to offer a new vision of Woolf as a literary historian essentially interested in the textuality of history — its readability and intelligibility, what it writes, unwrites, leaves unfinished and excludes; and to uncover the specific coherence of her history of nineteenth-century women’s literature beyond its apparent heterogeneity and contradictory impulses.

Anne Besnault is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rouen – Normandy, France. Her research focuses on modernist fiction and criticism, short story theory, genre and gender studies in nineteenth- and twentieth century British literature, literary history, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf’s essays and fiction. With Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, she is the co-editor of Beyond the Victorian and Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts (Routledge, 2018). She is also the author of Virginia Woolf’s Unwritten Histories: Conversations with the Nineteenth Century (Routledge: 2022).