In Framing Pieces, Whittier-Ferguson recovers and explores drafts, notes, glosses, essays, and guides that high modernists, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound generated in order to interpret their own work. These archival materials reveal a complex picture of how texts like Finnegan's Wake, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, and ABC's of Reading were annotated and framed by their authors, and how the authors illuminated and obscured various aspects of the annotations.

In this debut book, Glenny (Ph.D., English literature), a former anorexic, attributes the "omnipresence" of food in the writing of Virginia Woolf to her "premature weaning" (at ten weeks), the early death of her mother, and, most significantly, sexual abuse by her half-brother. While this densely written study breaks new ground in Woolf scholarship, Glenny goes too far by becoming an apologist for anorexia. Instead of simply showing how important food was as a metaphor for Woolf, Glenny makes disturbing comments such as "anorexia can, at its most positive, function as a bell-jar in which personal and political change is fermented."

Politics and Aesthetics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. As a feminist, Woolf wanted to incorporate her political interests in her fiction, but overt political statement conflicted with her aesthetic ideals. Her solution was to combine innovative narrative techniques and subject matter traditionally associated with women.

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.

The marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf is best understood as a dialogue of two outsiders about ideas of social and political belonging and exclusion. These ideas infused the written work of both partners and carried over into literary modernism itself, in part through the influence of the Woolfs' groundbreaking publishing company, the Hogarth Press. In this book, the first to focus on Virginia Woolf's writings in conjunction with those of her husband, Natania Rosenfeld illuminates Leonard's sense of ambivalent social identity and its affinities to Virginia's complex ideas of subjectivity.