Referring to the work of the English writer, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Heidi Storl suggests that a ‘discussion of the seemingly unlikely alliance between these two thinkers generates new strategies by which to “look through” much of our daily experience and discover – even if only momentarily – what it is to be human’ (2008: 303). Despite the marked variances between Woolf and Heidegger in terms of their backgrounds, experiences, vocations, nationalities and political orientations, this book proposes that at the heart of the issue of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared and profound overarching concerns. Such areas of concern include, but are certainly not limited to, the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; an understanding of the individual as a temporal being; the emphasis upon intersubjective relations, insofar as Being-in-theworld is defi ned by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual's relationship to and with the world.

The focus of this study is Woolf's understanding and representation of the connection between self and world throughout the various forms of her writings from the perspective of the notion of ‘Being-in-theworld’, a term coined by Heidegger in his 1927 text, Being and Time, which refers to an existential-phenomenological analysis of the connection between human beings and the world from the point of view of lived experience and average everyday involvements within particular physical, societal and historical contexts. It is from such a perspective that references to the term ‘world’ throughout the following chapters denote ‘the web of our social and cultural relations, our relations to artifacts, and our relations to nature’ (Thiele 1995: 179). In Being and Time, Heidegger refers to human beings as ‘Dasein’; in its everyday German usage, this term possesses an ontological emphasis that is in keeping with Heidegger's focus in Being and Time, in that it refers principally to ‘the type of Being that is distinctive’ of human beings (Mulhall 2003: 14).