Hadas Wagner

Thesis Title: Metonymy, Absence, and the Environment in the Works of Virginia Woolf

Supervisor: Professor Kate McLoughlin

Doctoral Research: My research explores the relationship between humans and the environment through the use of metonymical structures in Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre. It seeks to combine a formalist approach with ecocritical and feminist perspectives, showing how Woolf’s deployment of a form based on contiguity, materiality, and plurality sheds light on the possibility of maintaining a dialogue and connection with the environment which is not based on reflection or similitude. I am also interested in examining metonymy’s particular relations to absence and the implications this has for understanding Woolf’s view on the existing gaps between self and other, human and nature. 

Research Interests: formalism, feminism, narratology, ecocriticism, modernism