"Too inhuman": The Destabilization of Empire in Woolf's The Voyage Out*

Abstract

Applying Bruno Latour's understanding of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to Virginia Woolf's novel The Voyage Out, this paper argues that the non-human in the novel consistently act as Latourian mediators, impacting networks as much as, if not more than, the characters in the novel, and ultimately destabilizing the efforts of anthropocentric colonial imperatives.