Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf’s Flush
Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) takes its place alongside Orlando as a key modernist experiment with the norms and conventions of life writing. Flush is what might be described as a metabiographical text, probing the consequences for life writing, revealing it to be an inextricable entanglement not just of male, female, upper-, and lower-class life histories, but also of human and nonhuman ways of encountering the world. Furthermore, in modeling nonhuman phenomenology, Flush suggests how coming to terms with stories about nonhuman lives calls for a new, “transdisciplinary” paradigm for narrative inquiry.