The book presents Austen and Woolf as materialists - a wholly new critical and political perspective. In conscious opposition to the growing dominance of idealist ideology in their own times, they assert an egalitarian, constitutive continuity between people, things, and the physical universe. This radical redistribution of the importance of things and the biological challenges the idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that underpins gender, sexuality, class and race subordination. Equally, it radically reconfigures notions of interiority and human exceptionalism. This materialist underst ... More

The book presents Austen and Woolf as materialists - a wholly new critical and political perspective. In conscious opposition to the growing dominance of idealist ideology in their own times, they assert an egalitarian, constitutive continuity between people, things, and the physical universe. This radical redistribution of the importance of things and the biological challenges the idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that underpins gender, sexuality, class and race subordination. Equally, it radically reconfigures notions of interiority and human exceptionalism. This materialist understanding produces an experimental writing practice termed worldly realism, constituted by innovations in focalisation, an emphasis upon things as they mediate self, social, cultural and physical existence. The book substantiates this view of Austen’s and Woolf’s work by means of close textual readings of the novels alongside new research on public discourses and forces of consumerism, productivity and processes of change. Austen and Woolf enter their writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution and the First World War when established order and values were destabilised. Sharing a political inheritance of empirical Enlightenment scepticism, their rigorous critiques of the danger s of mental vision unchecked by facts, is more timely than ever in the current world dominated by fundamentalist free market, religious and nationalist belief systems.