On Beauty and Being: Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Virginia Woolf’s Hermeneutics of the Beautiful

The book is an exploration of the affinities between Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Virginia Woolf’s philosophy of beauty and Being embodied in her oeuvre. The study addresses beauty as a mode of being rather than a mere adornment of human existence. Tracing Plato’s legacy in the two authors, it espouses the proximity of truth and beauty, and argues for beauty’s restorative capacity discerned in the repetitive patterns of the universe. Showing the poetics of Gadamer and Woolf as mutually interpenetrating, it encourages to see the beauty of the poetic word as a gateway to Being. This meditation on beauty and Being contests the prevailing ways of thinking about the (in)dependent fields of literature and philosophy.