Bringing together a community of Woolf scholars from across Europe, the essays in the present volume explore new persectives on Woolf’s work for the early twenty-first century. In so doing they espouse that conceptual movement implicit in the title Trans-Woolf which runs rhizomatically through Woolf’s œuvre. Thinking Woolf through other languages: French, Italian, Spanish, and other media: music, early photography, cartoon-strip, they address questions of translational ethics, the intra-scriptural, the trans-medial, the transference, transmission, transfixation and transgression. From the transparency and depth of her poetics, her ear for the other side of language exposed in translation, to the counter-nationalist, counter-individualist dynamic at the heart of her politics, Woolf’s own lifelong concern with thinking outside and against entrenched figures or territories of authority here intersects with the translator’s task of navigating outside familiar mappings, crossing borders, thereby imagining those forms of survival and foreign afterlives for which her work yearns.

Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio is President of the Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes; she teaches Modernist literature and Translation Studies at the Institut Catholique de Paris and the Centre Européen de Traduction Littéraire. Her research explores the interface between Modernism and Modernity, Literature and Psychoanalysis, in the context of European Modernisms.