Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction

In Trespassing Boundaries, contemporary Woolf scholars discuss the literary importance of Woolf’s short stories. Despite being easily available, these stories have not yet received the attention they deserve. Complex yet involving, they should be read not only for the light they shed on Woolf’s novels, but in their own right, as major contributions to short fiction as a genre. This volume places Woolf’s short stories in the context of modernist experimentalism, then explores them as ambitious attempts to challenge generic boundaries, undercutting traditional distinctions between short fiction and the novel, between experimental and popular fiction, between fiction and nonfiction. Collectively the essays suggest that Woolf’s contribution to the short story is as important as her contribution to the novel.