The present volume seeks to explore the implications of Woolf's

contemporaneity in terms of her own era and of ours. By looking

at how one can grasp the meaning of one's time from within

and without, it traces ways in which her fictional as well as non-fictional

works reflect on or engage with those forms of untimeliness or

out-of-timeness in the present which enable an author to see its shadows

or perceive its obscurity. While the undertaking suggests a philosophically-inclined

quest, it is no less inscribed in acutely topical, political

issues as it is necessarily in the search for a poetics corresponding

to Woolf's vision. Attempting to understand Virginia Woolf's complex

relationship with her time also sheds light on how we read and engage

with her works today. It reveals ways of understanding her writing as an

indictment of the barbarity she perceived in her age and in the culture

it both inherited and produced, defining those crystallising moments

when the present of writing becomes contemporary to us and glimpsing

spectres at work within her texts as not only ghosts of the past but

the premonitory figures of our own century.