Current Projects

The Digital ‘Anon’: A Digital Genetic Edition of Virginia Woolf's Final Essays

2022-2025

In the final months of her life, Virginia Woolf started to write a history of English literature she never lived to finish. This project, extant only as a constellation of fragmentary drafts, has come to be known by the dual title of ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’. This history is not patterned around the writings of singular named authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf. Rather, it stems from the ‘nameless vitality’ of Anon, the unnamed poet-singer whose voice precedes and makes possible literature in English. In this project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I aim to create the first complete edition of this late archive, deploying genetic and digital editorial methodologies in order to best portray the richly generative textuality of this archive.

Virginia Woolf and Futurity: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics

2022-present

I am working on a monograph based on my thesis. Virginia Woolf: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics makes the case that Woolf had a lifelong interest in questions of the future: of how people, things, objects, and words endure into an unknown futurity, and in more practical questions of how to make the future a better place, free from the strictures of patriarchy and militarism. The project is under contract with Edinburgh University Press

Virginia Woolf's Futures, 1934-41: Substrate, Archive, Anterior

2018-2021

My PhD thesis read Virginia Woolf's late work as orientated towards the future. I take as my starting point for this future-facing orientation the holograph draft of the dinner party scene in The Years, written in January 1934. I use these late draft works to make the case that, from January 1934, Woolf starts to imagine new futures premised on genuine difference, futures that offer an alternative to patriarchy, to fascism, and to war, and I further argue that Woolf uses the textual space afforded her by the draft page as a locus to imagine such futures.

Publications

2026 (forthcoming)

Virginia Woolf and Futurity

Edinburgh University Press

2022

How Should One Read ‘The Reader’: New Approaches to Virginia Woolf's Late Archive

Textual Cultures, vol 14.2, pp. 195-219

DOI 10.14 434/tc .v14i 2.33658

2020

Thoughts on Peace in a Wine Cellar: On Transcribing the 1917 Dinner Party Scene in the Holograph Years

Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 26, pp. 1-82

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26932359

2020

Thoughts on Peace in a Wine Cellar: A Transcription of the 1917 Dinner Party Scene in the Holograph Years

Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 26, pp. 13-86

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26932360

CV

Contact

joshua.phillips@ell.ox.ac.uk
@josh_iswriting
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