Issue 105 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany Special Topic:

Panoramic Woolf (Fall 2026)

Guest Editors: Oliver Case, Evelyn Malinowski, Teresa Prudente

Please submit article proposals of approximately 300 words by 1st December 2025

Final article drafts (no more than 2500 words including Works Cited) will be due by 15 May 2026

Please send submissions to: panoramicwoolf@gmail.com

The panorama, as an art form first developed by painter Robert Barker in the late eighteenth century, asked the spectator to enter a circular room through a trapdoor and from there immerse themselves in an apparently seamless vista of a particular cityscape or landscape. This design, composed of brazen illusion and conviction, promises exhaustive representation and reveals the impossibility of total capture. As pointed out by Markman Ellis through the notion of the locality paradox, panoramas stage an unstable dialectic between immersion and detachment, spectacle and critique, synthesis and dispersal. They embody paradoxes central to Virginia Woolf’s aesthetic practice: the tension between fragment and whole, individual perspective and collective vision, intimacy and distance, movement and stasis. From the panoramas of London streets and Cornish coastlines to Woolf’s narrative panoramas of consciousness, cultural history, and society, the concept of the panoramic opens new pathways for considering her negotiations with form, perception, politics, and modernity.

This special issue seeks to examine the panorama as an analytical lens that may illuminate Woolf’s work in a fresh way. Taking into account both the panorama’s  historical specificity as a visual apparatus (Stephan Oettermann, Bernard Comment, Wolfgang Schivelbusch) and  the theoretical, sociopolitical, and phenomenological implications of “seeing the whole” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Terry Smith, Nanna Verhoeff), how does Woolf stage panoramic visions and immersions across her oeuvre ? How might panoramic perspectives extend to and intersect with panoptics and sensorial hegemonies, too-much-ness and trauma, colonial sentiments, feminist politics, experiments with narrative form, or Western modernity at large? In what ways does Woolf’s writing resist, fragment, or subvert panoramic totality? And, as was discussed during our panel at the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, how can the panorama be used to understand Woolf’s dissident writing in terms of practice, form, and content?

We invite scholars, authors, poets and artists to contribute to the continued broadening of “panorama” as it relates to Woolf. We welcome dissident forms and creative takes.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Woolf and forms of totality, world picturing

• Woolf and panorama in the visual arts, art history

• Narrative structure and the panoramic view: totality, fragmentation, multiplicity

• Panoramic time: history, memory, and the longuedurée in Woolf

• Panoramic ecology: environments, species, communities, ecosystems

• Comparative approaches: Woolf and contemporaries engaging the panoramic mode

• The panorama as an epistemological or phenomenological metaphor in Woolf studies

• Feminist critiques of panoramic mastery: gender, vision, and spectatorship in Woolf

• Empire, nation, and the global panorama: Woolf’s writing on colonialism

• Noticing everything: intermediality and cross-sensorial navigation