Claudia Olk’s research while affiliated with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and other places

'The danger is in the neatness of identifications', Samuel Beckett famously stated, and, at first glance, no two authors could be further distant from one another than William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. This book addresses the vast intertextual network between the works of both writers and explores the resonant correspondences between them. It analyses where and how these resonances manifest themselves in their aesthetics, theatre, language and form. It traces convergences and inversions across both œuvres that resound beyond their conditions of production and possibility. Uncovering hitherto unexplored relations between the texts of an early modern and a late modern author, this study seeks to offer fresh readings of single passages and entire works, but it will also describe productive tensions and creative incongruences between them.

This article focuses on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury in and after 1918. It looks at the ways in which the Woolfs, together with members of their circle of friends and family, recorded their experience, their political views, and their attitudes towards Germany, the US and Russia during the final months of the First World War and how they received the arrival of peace. Part of the overall argument will be devoted to tracing the means by which Bloomsbury and the various societies and clubs that were related to it tried to maintain continuity during the war years in London, Richmond and Sussex. A main part of the article will then analyse the development of Bloomsbury’s literary and artistic production and the new connections between art, literature and politics that were forged in the aftermath of the founding of the Hogarth Press in 1917.