Akadémia Kiadó

The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf is a book which is well calculated to bring about the long awaited breakthrough in the appreciation of Virginia Woolf as an intellectual author. A. O. Frank argues that in Woolf's mature novels we find a coherent body of philosophical thought which is none the less precisely argued for being presented in lyrical prose. In sections of meticulously precise close reading Frank analyses the complex mechanisms of 'textual engineering' through which Woolf's ideas find expression. Educated in the German/Continental tradition of Aesthetics and Philosophy, the author believes that for a thought to be thought out properly, it needs to be thought out philosophically. Speaking from a fruitfully intermediate position between British and Continental culture, she highlights and explicates Woolf's philosophical thought by analysing carefully selected passages from existential, cosmological and epistemological texts by Nietzsche as well as Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein and Derrida.

A. O. Frank earned her PhD in English and Aesthetics at Budapest University and completed the present project after a Visiting Studentship to Oxford University financed by the Soros Foundation and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Having lectured in English for 6 years at Budapest University she has recently shifted her interest toward psychotherapy and evolutionary studies.