Jesse Wolfe

Candidate statement

A tenured professor at CSU Stanislaus, I have authored two books rooted in modernism—
especially the Bloomsbury Group—that explore intimacy from Victorian through contemporary
times. My first book argues that a crisis in intimate relations was a generative influence on
modern philosophy and literature. Two forms of tension—between theories of sexual selfhood on
the one hand, and attitudes toward social mores on the other hand—structure six major texts.
Virginia Woolf and others articulate anti-essentialist accommodations to marriage and
monogamy, whereas E. M. Forster and others articulate essentialist rejections of marriage.
Funded by a nine-month full-time NEH grant, my second book examines how six
contemporary novels complicate Jean Francois Lyotard’s claims about “incredulity toward
metanarrative.” They are enriched, I argue, by an unarticulated attachment to the idea of
historical progress. They see the fruits of progress as much in improved intimate relations as in
an improved social order; they wonder whether such loves will be more common in the future;
and, aware of their literary-historical roots, they respond to Bloomsburian precedents.
On my home campus I am the organizer of a series, “Conversations with Authors and
Artists,” in which I interview faculty about their creative and scholarly work.
Publications
“Bloomsbury, Friendship, and Love.” The Cambridge History of the Bloomsbury Group, ed.
Derek Ryan. 6,000 words. Expected publication: October 2025.
Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form after Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History.
Bloomsbury Academic Press. January 2023. 258 pp.
Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge UP. July 2011. 272 pp.
“The Sane Woman in the Attic: Sexuality and Self-Authorship in Mrs Dalloway.” Modern
Fiction Studies 51:1 (Spring 2005): 34-59.