“An Intermittent Music”: Trans-Corporeality in Virginia Woolf

This article explores Virginia Woolf’s interweaving of ecological and materialist concerns across her writing. It seeks to build on scholarship’s growing attentiveness to ecological veins in Woolf’s writing, and how her work anticipates the de-hierarchisation of human and nonhuman categories explored in recent new materialist thinking. It considers how Stacy Alaimo’s “trans- corporeality,” an intermeshing of the human with more-than-human worlds that foregrounds the interchanges and interconnections between various bodies, may provide a framework for reading vibrantly materialist Woolfian worlds. It traces a variety of trans-corporeal networks in her writing, exploring how such connections—successful, failed, resisted, transformed—highlight patterns of relationality in the interwoven ecological, ethical and political strands of her work. Ultimately, it suggests that reading for the trans-corporeal allows one to consider Woolfian relationality as a malleable creative language that reconceptualises seemingly codified structures within literature, and across the human and nonhuman.