Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys

One of the monograph’s most compelling contributions is its attention to materiality as a mode of reading modernist fiction. Writing against narratives of modernity as increasingly disenchanted and disembodied, Talviste argues that modernist fictions of Woolf and Rhys repeatedly return to the body as a site through which intimacy is reconfigured. Placing two compelling authors such as Woolf and Rhys together, Strange Intimacies brings their modernisms in dialogue and suggests that both develop alternative models of relational intimacy that challenge hierarchical structures of knowledge, history, and community. Talviste’s study’s engagement with affect theory and feminist philosophy allows it to trace connections between literary form, ethical relation, and historical experience. [...]the book’s comparative structure offers a nuanced way of rethinking intimacy as affective and embodied within modernist studies. -- Samriddhi Singh, Banaras Hindu University * The British Society for Literature and Science *
Populated with feeling bodies and exploring sensory joy, this is a book for scholars interested in affective, affirmative approaches to the modernist novel. Supported by insights from feminist, new materialist and posthumanist thought, Talviste’s perceptive readings of Woolf and Rhys stage intimate encounters with human strangers and more-than-human strangeness. * Derek Ryan, University of Kent *