This chapter reads the formulation of modernism itself as a passive revolution in Virginia Woolf’s experimental prose. The passive revolution she conceives in The Waves, like Gramsci’s rendering of the “revolution without revolution," plays on the paradox of conservative content and radical form. Woolf’s novel illuminates the failures of high modernism to represent the world and performs a kind of self-critique, as well as a critique of the limitations of Western modernism created by a bourgeois class with a pretense for world-making in concert with the British establishment. The Waves advances the idea of global modernism by seeing the world as an invention of language wielded by an ambitious few. Colonial India stands at the center as that misty site of desire and loss against which the communal identity of its six characters is formed. Empire is imagined here as a vacuum, with absence at its center, and formalized in Woolf’s novel as a passive revolution tied to the advancing day.

This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Waves through the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money waxes nostalgic for a world of industrial capital where people with good characters invest in respected businesses over the long term. Keynes blames the “great slump” on a system of financial speculation made possible by the modern corporation that encourages investors to anticipate and value the vacillations of popular opinion instead of sound business practices. This chapter argues that Woolf’s novel encodes the logic of financial speculation as described by Keynes in her depiction of characters who redefine themselves according to fluctuating social configurations. The resulting novelistic poetics constitute an aesthetic of volatility characteristic of high modernism that anticipates the emergence of affective intensity as the dominant value form of our own era of capitalism.

The conclusion applies the semiotics of affect imagined by Imagism and The Waste Land to several of the novels from the earlier parts of the book, including The Moonstone, A Study in Scarlet, The Waves, and Voyage in the Dark. The conclusion argues that in late Victorian novels affective expressions are incorporated into a novelistic poetics of character, while in the proto-modernist and modernist novels affective expression becomes an object of literary conjecture, a vector of critique, and a source of literary and economic value.

Chapter 3 draws on 1950s and 1960s cybernetics-inflected psychology, represented by W. Ross Ashby and Silvan Tomkins. Love examines the theory of language Virginia Woolf employs in The Waves (1931) and more explicitly presents in a 1937 radio talk, contextualizing Woolf’s emphasis on gaps in perception and suggestive linguistic potential in terms of Ashby’s cybernetic “black-box” thought experiment and Tomkins’s cybernetics-based theories of affect. This work illuminates Woolf’s strategy of highlighting the variety of affective responses that specific scenarios can produce for different subjects, even within the most intimate communities. The comparison shows how Woolf’s aesthetic model, through its invocation of radio’s built-in black-box aesthetic of “blindness,” teaches readers about the way cybernetic thinking inflects social and interpersonal contexts: as we attempt to interact with and relate to one another, we must rely on perceptions that are incomplete, partial, and individually inflected. By drawing audiences’ attention to this aspect of our social world, Woolf makes cybernetic thinking affectively motivated and relevant at the level of personal interaction.

Chapter 5, “The Children of Others in Woolf,” begins by acknowledging an obvious truth: no English writer is more famous for not having children than Virginia Woolf. There can be little doubt that this is because she was a woman. But critics noting Woolf’s experience of childlessness have never made much of an effort to explain why this matters for her books. It matters a lot, for Woolf returned throughout her novels to the representation of contradictory sentiments toward the question of having children. Masterpieces like To the Lighthouse and The Waves thrum with competing expressions of yearning and distaste. The late novel The Years is explicit about the ugliness of parents’ overvaluation of their own children. Woolf’s short fiction is no less complex on this theme: “A Society” imagines a birth strike by women, while “Lappin and Lapinova” dramatizes the privations of childlessness. Woolf’s novels proposed a recurring resolution of the tension between fecundity and austerity: children were to be included in the purview of fiction, but ideally at a necessary distance, as the offspring of other people.