Exploring the intimate links between text and skin, this thesis examines the ways in which Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith approach tactile experience within the touch-transforming contexts from which...Show moreExploring the intimate links between text and skin, this thesis examines the ways in which Virginia Woolf and Ali Smith approach tactile experience within the touch-transforming contexts from which their novels The Waves (1931) and How to be Both (2014) emerge. Drawing on the first sustained study that investigates literature and tactility since the publication of seminal works on touch by thinkers of deconstruction such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, it looks at the two texts from the perspective of a tactful reading. Engaging with the texts with close attention and from a distance, it argues that tactile experience not only resides in the contact of skin on skin, but also in the space between skin and skin. Looking primarily at how the writers give expression to a touch that transforms and a touch that reaches out both in and through their texts, it also draws attention to the way that memory, the shared thematic concern of the novels, too exhibits moments of change and nearness. Finally, this thesis seeks to open up a discussion on the limits and possibilities of a tactful approach and relates it to the potential it offers to the reading of recent innovative literary projects that respond to some of today’s most poignant issues regarding tactility, digital technology and human connection. Inspired by the astounding and intimate sensory surrounds of Ann Hamilton’s large-scale multi-media installation the event of a thread (2012), it demonstrates an attention to the presence of the tactile, and perhaps most importantly, an attention to the presence of each other.Show less