Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity

Download or read book Virginia Woolf, Science, Radio, and Identity written by Catriona Livingstone and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.