Professor Elizabeth Abel's "Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies," Published

Elizabeth Abel's "Odd Affinities"
May 14, 2024

Congratulations to Professor Elizabeth Abel, whose new book "Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf's Shadow Genealogies" was published by The University of Chicago Press in April. Professor Abel's book is 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." (University of Chicago Press)