But, you may say that nearly twenty years after the publication of Mark Hussey's collection Virginia Woolf and War and more than ten years after the publication of my own Virginia Woolf and the Great War there is little left to say on the contradictory topics of war and peace in regard to Virginia Woolf. Yet, interest in the topics continues to grow and is of international concern (as seen, for example, in Jane Goldman and Bryony Randall's forthcoming collection, Virginia Woolf in Context). Like Virginia Woolf, speaking of the Great War in the first decade after the Armistice, we can see, in the shadow of 9/11 and the second decade of the 21st century, that there has been “[a] shift in the scale…ma[king] us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present” (CE2 157). These words, taken from “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (1925), can clearly be applied to today's world, reflecting internationalism and the fluidity of boundaries that are now the currency of post-modernist/twenty-first-century criticism, and it is in the contemporary approaches to the war writings of Virginia Woolf herein assembled that we confront both her cultural realities and our own. Drawn from Jane Wood's edited collection, The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf's Writings (2010), this roundtable is composed of a representative from each of four distinct yet blurred lines of discussion.

With the ubiquitous presence of war, in whatever context and according to whatever grotesquely varied definition, interest in the topic and its realities has burgeoned and its study accepted into the canon, not only in the English-speaking world, but internationally; a reality made the more apparent at academic conferences, in college classrooms, in published writings, in popular culture, and on the Internet. Technology not only underscores advances in the war machine, as Donna Haraway and Mark Hussey have made clear, but suggests the international connectiveness and reach of Woolf and her ideas.