Abstract

Long treated as a novel of unsurpassed interior depth, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) also acts as an extended meditation upon the food that sustains such a conceptual model of human inwardness and subjectivity. While depicting rituals of meat eating, Woolf’s novel internalizes and challenges the conventional narratives of becoming human by animating the nonhuman world that surrounds and infuses them. The text’s many scenes of ingestion expose the violence that inheres in transforming the substance of others into the tissue of the exceptional human subject. Such scenes mark a “postanthropocentric shift” in Woolf’s fiction, prompting readers to consider the connections between epistemological and consumptive practices. In doing so, The Waves tests the limits of existing cultural, ontological, and gastronomical categories in order to give voice to the stuff of life.

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