Introduction: What's Between Us?

The Introduction offers the question "what's between us" as one way of summing up Virginia Woolf's questions. Woolf draws us into a tingling, Brownian zone of encounter and registers the aesthetic, ontological, and ethical force of encounter in that zone. The essays chosen for the issue treat not only the sexual, economic, national, and imperial dimensions of Woolf's rendering of these encounters but also, by way of such philosophers as Emmanuel Levinas, the ethical dimensions.