Had there been an axe handy: transatlantic modernism, Virginia Woolf and Jean Toomer

This article looks at transatlantic modernist intertextuality and identifies African American influences and voices in the writing of Virginia Woolf. While comparisons between Woolf and the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer have occasionally been made in transatlantic studies of the matrix of modernism, little attention has been paid to the possibility of more direct or precise connections and intertexts. This essay offers a reading of a precise intertext between Woolf and Toomer and suggests further citations by Woolf of African American writing.