‘God Damn This War’ : Virginia Woolf’s Struggle for Peace between the Wars
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | This paper analyses Virginia Woolf's non-fiction writings in the years of and between the three wars which had a direct impact on her personal and public life, from the First World War which shaped her generation and made her question the sanity of the society that went on living as if millions had not perished in vain, the Spanish Civil War to which she lost her nephew Julian Bell and which would become one of driving forces for her book-length anti-war essay Three Guineas, all the way to the Second World War that would eventually play a significant role in her ending her life. But there was no end to her vision. In the last year of her life she publishes ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, an open attack on ‘Hitlerism’, as well as the ‘The Leaning Tower’ which she concludes by speculating defiantly about 'The next generation – there will be a next generation, in spite of this war and whatever it brings,’ asking the reader to join her in imagining the future developments in English poetry – believing, perhaps more than in anything else and despite all the odds, in the survival of culture. |
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