Melissa Alexander

Thesis Title: 'What am I to do with these?': Literary Objects in Virginia Woolf's Oeuvre.

Supervisor: Laura Marcus

Doctoral Research: My research focuses on Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with household objects throughout her literary ouevre. I demonstrate how objects become implicated in the purported divide between Edwardian and modernist fiction, how they produce skepticism regarding social conventions and "reality" as such, and mediate problems of time and intersubjectivity. By exploring the specific challenges objects offer to both reading and writing processes, I hope to foreground the importance of objects to aesthetic and philosophical thought in the modernist era, suggesting that they provide provocative tools for thinking critically about social life, artistic production and community.

Research Interests: Anglophone literary modernism, the Bloomsbury Group, Edwardian fiction, object aesthetics, eighteenth and early twentieth-century British philosophy, domesticity, material culture