Conversation Pieces by Melissa Alexander
Conversation Pieces sketches an object-oriented lineage for modernism, showing that Virginia Woolf's passion for objects was fuelled by her participation in a widespread conversation about philosophical empiricism's affective and aesthetic legacies--one involving a variety of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century thinkers, such as David Hume, Leslie Stephen, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Henri Bergson, William James, G.E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell. While empiricism has been largely neglected by literary scholars, its view of objects powerfully shaped modernist sensibilities and aesthetics. Woolf's and other early-twentieth-century writers and philosophers' multifaceted responses to the evolving character of empiricist philosophy reveal that empiricism continued into the twentieth century as one of the most ubiquitous and vigorous elements energizing modern thought. However, modernism was also defined by an important departure from empiricism. While traditional empiricism had suggested that experience is profoundly circumscribed because we can only know our own sense impressions, many sought to radicalize empiricism by making the preliminary acceptance of mind-independent objects the necessary foundation for intersubjectivity and the acknowledgement of otherness. Woolf describes the scene of shared attention to an object as an exemplary starting point for engaging with the complexities, contradictions, and tensions of living in a more-than-human world. As writers continually turned to the object for its promise of a conversable world, the conversation piece came to encapsulate modern aspirations for relationality.-
Wordsworth and Coleridge
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The Making of Percy's Reliques
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Anais Nin, Fictionality and Femininity
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On Sympathy
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Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689
- Refugee Writing, Refugee Reading
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Reading Veganism
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Geometries of Empathy
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The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language
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James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
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Poetic Effects in the Prose of Virginia Woolf and Emilio Cecchi
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Committed Styles
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Modernist Parody
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V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought
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Charles Olson and American Modernism
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Visionary Philology
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Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time
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Memories of a Lost War
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Defending Poetry
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Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction
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Metafiction and the Postwar Novel
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The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism
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The Platonism of Walter Pater
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Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders
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The Art of Hunger
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Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland
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Spatial Poetics
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John Lydgate's Fall of Princes
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South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain
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Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart
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Melodious Tears
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Shelley and Scripture
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W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State
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Coleridge and the Doctors
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John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine
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Divine Cartographies
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Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne
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Acting Between the Lines
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H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers 1913-1946
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Late Shakespeare
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Ireland and Scotland
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Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print
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The Godwinian Novel
Melissa Alexander is an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and an award-winning DPhil graduate from the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research explores how modernist authors' approach to objects is crucially shaped by the affective legacies of eighteenth-century philosophical empiricism. Her work on modernist objects, affects, ethics, and intimacies has been published in the Critical Quarterly (2023) and Virginia Woolf, Objects, Things, and Matter (2025).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780198990659 |
| ISBN 10 | 0198990650 |
| Title | Conversation Pieces |
| Author | Melissa Alexander |
| Series | Oxford English Monographs |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | OUP Oxford |
| Year published | 2026-04-23 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |