About the Series
The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination.
The unique structure of the volumes allows the term “understanding” to describe an introductory knowledge of a field and a figure for advanced students and scholars new to the subject, while at the same time describing the evolving “understanding” scholars in a field gain with the publication of a new body of work by leading experts. This multi-level understanding emerges from a three-part division of each volume. The first part conceptualizes the volume’s key figure by offering close readings of their central philosophical texts. The second section on aesthetics resembles a more traditional edited collection by bringing together new research by diverse international scholars aimed at mapping relationships between the thought of a key philosophical figure and the literary work of a variety of modernist texts. The final section of each volume is an extended glossary of the philosopher’s key terms. In a departure from conventional glossaries, however, the entries are mini-essays in themselves, allowing a real engagement with the many, sometimes contradictory, ways the figure has applied the terms. Each definition has its own expert contributor.
Mgr. Veronika Krajíčková, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Arts, University of South Bohemia. Her dissertation, entitled “The Problem of the Fixity of Tables: Virginia Woolf as a Non-Dualist and Process-Oriented Thinker”, focused on Virginia Woolf’s fiction analysed by means of process philosophy. It was awarded the Prof. Martin Hilský Prize for the Best Dissertation in 2021. Veronika’s first monograph, Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker, based on her dissertation, was published in 2023. Veronika is mainly interested in English and American modernism, particularly in modernist women authors such as Woolf, Mansfield, Barnes, or Rhys, but also in contemporary British fiction. She is a member of the International Virginia Woolf Society and the European Society for Process Thought and she has presented papers at various conferences both in the Czech Republic and abroad. She is also a student and early career researcher representative of the International Process Network. She has published a couple of translations of Woolf’s essays in Host literary magazine. She contributes regularly to the online literary magazine iLiteratura.cz.