"For decades, Virginia Woolf's work has been seen as part of the "women's writing" canon. Elizabeth Abel extracts Woolf from this women's tradition to position her in a different light, one that shows Woolf's role in a far-reaching modernist genealogy. Abel traces the strong echoes of Woolf in the work of four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. As Abel shows, what Woolf called the "odd affinities" between herself and these successors give us an altogether different picture of the development of transnational modernism, with Woolf as a shadowy but important connection among disparate writers. By charting new pathways of twentieth-century literary transmission, Odd Affinities will appeal to students and scholars working in New Modernist studies, comparative literature, and African American studies"--

A meditation on the power and pleasures of the image, from paintings to photographs to migraine auras, by one of Britain's finest literary minds. In Affinities, Brian Dillon, who Joyce Carol Oates has said writes “fascinating prose . . . on virtually any subject,” explores images and artists he is drawn to and analyzes the attraction. What does it mean to claim affinity with a picture? What do feelings of affinity imply about the experience of art and of the world? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or solidarity, but has aspects of all three. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, Dillon examines works by artists such as Dora Maar and Andy Warhol, Rinko Kawauchi and Susan Hiller, as well as scientific or vernacular images of sea creatures and migraine auras. Written as a series of linked essays, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.