Hellenism and loss in the work of Virginia Woolf

Theodore Koulouris

Taking up Virginia Woolf's fascination with Greek literature and culture, this book explores her engagement with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of British Hellenism and her transformation of that multifaceted socio-cultural and political reality into a particular textual aesthetic, which Theodore Koulouris defines as 'Greekness.' Woolf's 'Greekness', Koulouris argues, enabled her to navigate male and female appropriations of British Hellenism and was singly important in providing her with a language of mourning.