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| Library status: currently open during regularly scheduled hours. |
The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Novels by
This book explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. Ann Ronchetti locates the sources of Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family heritage, her exposure to Walter Pater and the aesthetic movement, and the philosophical and aesthetic interests of the Bloomsbury group.
The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf by
For students of modern literature, the works of Virginia Woolf are essential reading. In her novels, short stories, essays, polemical pamphlets and in her private letters she explored, questioned and refashioned everything about modern life: cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, feminism, politics and war. Her elegant and startlingly original sentences became a model of modernist prose. This is a clear and informative introduction to Woolf's life, works, and cultural and critical contexts, explaining the importance of the Bloomsbury group in the development of her work. It covers the major works in detail, including To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and the key short stories. As well as providing students with the essential information needed to study Woolf, Jane Goldman suggests further reading to allow students to find their way through the most important critical works. All students of Woolf will find this a useful and illuminating overview of the field.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf by
"Nothing yet published about her so totally contradicts the legend of Virginia Woolf.... [This] is a first chance to meet the writer in her own unguarded words and to observe the root impulses of her art without the distractions of a commentary" (New York Times). Edited and with a Preface by Anne Olivier Bell; Introduction by Quentin Bell; Index.
The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness by
In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood. But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness--its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function--reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.
In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature by
Examining the writings and life of Virginia Woolf, In the Hollow of the Wave looks at how Woolf treated "nature" as a deliberate discourse that shaped her way of thinking about the self and the environment and her strategies for challenging the imbalances of power in her own culture--all of which remain valuable in the framing of our discourse about nature today. Bonnie Kime Scott explores Woolf's uses of nature, including her satire of scientific professionals and amateurs, her parodies of the imperial conquest of land, her representations of flora and fauna, her application of post-impressionist and modernist modes, her merging of characters with the environment, and her ventures across the species barrier. In shedding light on this discourse of Woolf and the natural world, Scott brings to our attention a critical, neglected, and contested aspect of modernism itself. She relies on feminist, ecofeminist, and postcolonial theory in the process, drawing also on the relatively recent field of animal studies. By focusing on multiple registers of Woolf's uses of nature, the author paves the way for more extended research in modernist practices, natural history, garden and landscape studies, and lesbian/queer studies.
Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism by
Who would have expected Jane Austen to be up-to-date on gun technology or Virginia Woolf to recognise the class politics of plumbing? Austen and Woolf are materialists, this book argues. 'Things' in their novels give us entry into some of the most contentious issues of the day. This wholly materialist understanding produces worldly realism, an experimental writing practice which asserts egalitarian continuity between people, things and the physical world. This radical redistribution of the importance of material objects and biological existence, challenges the traditional idealist hierarchy of mind over matter that has justified gender, class and race subordination. Entering their writing careers at the critical moments of the French Revolution and the First World War respectively, and sharing a political inheritance of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism, Austen's and Woolf's rigorous critiques of the dangers of mental vision unchecked by facts is more timely than ever in the current world dominated by fundamentalist neo-liberal, religious and nationalist belief systems. Key Features The book uses close readings from Sense and Sensibility, Mrs Dalloway, Emma, The Waves, Persuasion and The Years to demonstrate the materialist sensibilities of Austen and Woolf It traces the anti-individualism of their view of self and consciousness as deriving from embodied experience Each chapter foregrounds the constitutive interrelationship of things, people, social and physical worlds The book reconceptualises a progressive view of realism - worldly realism - drawing upon Jacques Rancière's thesis that a new democratic aesthetic regime is inaugurated around the end of the eighteenth century
Modernism, Narrative and Humanism by
In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanism's inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer , Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers' mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novel's narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.
Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration by
In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs shows how Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of race improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. Childs traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, The Waste Land, and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. The language of eugenics moves, he claims, between public discourse and personal perspectives. It informs Woolf's theorisation of woman's imagination; in Eliot's poetry, it pictures as a nightmare the myriad contemporary eugenical threats to humankind's biological and cultural future. And for Yeats, it becomes integral to his engagement with the occult and his commitment to Irish Nationalism. This is an original study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.
Mrs. Dalloway by
Some 70 years after its original publication, and following on the heels of the remarkable film adaptations of Orlando and A Room of One's Own, a film version worthy of Mrs. Dalloway's startling originality and fresh view of a woman's life has been conceived and made.
Parallaxes: Virginia Woolf Meets James Joyce by
Borrowed from optics, the concept of parallax identifies the apparently relative position of objects according to the lines of sight determined by the viewerOCOs standpoint. This concept proves particularly useful in opening new insights into the work of two major authors of Modernist literature: although coincidentally born and deceased in the same years (1882-1941), James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are seldom the object of a joint outlook. Such a watertight separation is witnessed by the scarci..."
Reading Virginia Woolf by
The pleasure and excitement of exploring Virginia Woolf's writings is at the heart of this book by a highly respected Woolf critic and biographer. Julia Briggs reconsiders Woolf's work - from some of her earliest fictional experiments to her late short story, 'The Symbol', and from the most to the least familiar of her novels - from a series of highly imaginative and unexpected angles. Individual essays analyse Woolf's neglected second novel, Night and Dayand investigate her links with other writers (Byron, Shakespeare), her ambivalent attitudes to 'Englishness' and to censorship, her fascination with transitional places and moments, with the flow of time (and its relative nature), her concern with visions and revision and with printing and the writing process as a whole. We watch Woolf as she typesets an extraordinarily complex high modernist poem (Hope Mirrlees's 'Paris'), and as she revises her novels so that their structures become formally - and even numerologically - significant. A final essay examines the differences between Woolf's texts as they were first published in England and America, and the further changes she occasionally made after publication, changes that her editors have been slow to acknowledge. Julia Briggs brings to these discussions an extensive knowledge of Woolf both as a scholar and as an editor. She records her findings and observations in a lively, graceful and approachable style that will entice readers to delve further and more meaningfully into Woolf's work. Features* Addresses a wide range of familiar and less familiar texts, including Woolf's short stories.* Opens up difficult texts in an inviting style.* Covers aspects of Woolf's work that have been consistently neglected or have never been considered before.
Virginia Woolf by
"A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. . . . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh." --The Philadelphia Inquirer While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact. Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit, and her sanity and strength. It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction--but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come. "One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history." --Financial Times "The most distinguished study of Woolf yet." --The New Republic
Virginia Woolf by
"Virginia Woolf is one of the foremost writers of this century, yet surprisingly this biography is the first to fully explore the relationship between her troubled life and her novels, essays, book reviews, letters, and diaries - celebrated works that made her such a noted literary figure." "All her life Woolf struggled with sadness that threatened to overwhelm and destroy her. In many ways her writings were attempts to counteract these powerful feelings and to grasp the healing forces of life. This was her central reason for writing: to investigate and curb her fascination with death and, at the same time, to capture the vitality of existence. The paradox was that such affirmation inevitably brought her back to the subjects she knew best: the destructiveness of men, the burdens of the past, and the fragility of life. In this absorbing biography James King examines how the raw material of Woolf's daily existence was transformed into art, and he pays close attention to her search for forms of writing that encompass a new feminist aesthetic." "Virginia Woolf sheds new light on this daring, impetuous, tormented artist, who strove relentlessly to find the right words to capture life's insubstantiality and its vibrancy."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Virginia Woolf by
This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
Virginia Woolf by
-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
Virginia Woolf's Novels and the Literary Past by
A number of interesting and powerful themes emerge in this study of Virginia Woolf's relation to the literary past...The strong account of Woolf's relation to tradition in Virginia Woolf's Novels and the Literary Pastwill surely facilitate further study of the gender politics of Modernism.' - Times Literary Supplement'An important intervention at a time in which there is particular interest in Woolf's relationship to the past.'Professor Laura Marcus, University of Sussex'Essential and intellectually provocative reading for Woolf scholars and for common readers alike.'Vara Neverow, University of ConnecticutNow available in paperback, this is the first book to explore Virginia Woolf's preoccupation with the literary past and its profound impact on the content and structure of her novels.It analyses Woolf's reading and writing practices via her essays, diaries and reading notebooks and presents chronological studies of eight of her novels, exploring how Woolf's intensive reading surfaced in her fiction. The book sheds light on Woolf's varied and intricate use of literary allusions; examines ways in which Woolf revisited and revised plots and tropes from earlier fiction; and looks at how she used parody as a means both of critical comment and homage.Key Features* The first book-length study of intertextuality in Virginia Woolf's novels* Offers a challenging and provocative new perspective on Woolf's art as a novelist* Develops detailed close readings offering fresh insights into individual works* Presents complex ideas in a lucid and accessible fashion
Virginia Woolf (Authors in Context) by
During Virginia Woolf's lifetime Britain's position in the world changed, and so did the outlook of its people. The Boer War and the First World War forced politicians and citizens alike to ask how far the power of the state extended into the lives of individuals; the rise of fascism provided one menacing answer. Woolf's experiments in fiction, and her unique position in the publishing world, allowed her to address such intersections of the public and the private.Michael H. Whitworth shows how ideas and images from contemporary novelists, philosophers, theorists, and scientists fuelled her writing, and how critics, film-makers, and novelists have reinterpreted her work for later generations.The book includes a chronology of Virginia Woolf's life and times, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index
Virginia Woolf, Fashion, and Literary Modernity by
Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity places Woolf´s writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s, and theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.C. Flugel. Bringing together studies in fashion, body culture and modernism, the book explores the modern fascination with sartorial fashion as well as with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice.Fashion was deeply implicated with the nineteenth-century modern and remained in focus for the modernities that continued to be proclaimed in the early decades of the following century. Clothing connects with the modernist topoi of the threshold, the trace and the interface; it is the place where character becomes image and where relations between subject and object, organic and inorganic play themselves out in a series of encounters and ruptures. Clothes also facilitate explorations in modern materialism, for instance as informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. Woolf´s work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, "thinking through clothes" in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future.Key Features: *Contributes new research to Woolf and Modernism studies*Explores the significance of textual representations of dress and sartorial fashion in modernist literature *Interdisciplinary approach which brings together studies of fashion, culture and literature*Adds a specific author focused analysis to current work on cultural embodiment and performance
Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant by 
Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer by
By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as "sledge-hammer blows,+? beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as she was ("skinless+? was her word) she began, through these years, to practice her art--and to discover how it could serve her. Ultimately, she came to feel that it was her "shock-receiving capacity+? that had made her a writer. Astonishingly gifted from the start, Woolf learned to be attentive to the movements of her own mind. Through self-reflection she found a language for the ebb and flow of thought, fantasy, feeling, and memory, for the shifts of light and dark. And in her writing she preserved, recreated, and altered the dead, altering in the process her internal relationship with their "invisible presences.+? "I will go backwards & forwards+? she remarked in her diary, a comment on both her imaginative and writerly practice. Following Woolf's lead, psychologist Katherine Dalsimer moves backward and forward between the work of Woolf's maturity and her early journals, letters, and unpublished juvenilia to illuminate the process by which Woolf became a writer. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory as well as on Woolf's life and work, and trusting Woolf's own self-observations, Dalsimer offers a compelling account of a young artist's voyage out--a voyage that Virginia Woolf began by looking inward and completed by looking back.
Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader by
This study argues that Virginia Woolf taught herself to be a feminist artist and public intellectual through her revisionary reading. Fernald gives a clear view of Woolf's tremendous body of knowledge and her contrast references to past literary periods
Virginia Woolf and the Great War by
This study focuses on Virginia Woolf's war consciousness and how her sensitivity to representations of the Great War in the popular press and authorized histories affected both the development of characters in her fiction and her non-fictional and personal writings.
Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-century Domestic Novel by
In Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, Emily Blair explores how nineteenth-century descriptions of femininity saturate both Woolf s fiction and her modernist manifestos. Moving between the Victorian and modernist periods, Blair looks at a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources, including the literature of conduct and household management, as well as autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction. She argues for a reevaluation of Woolf s persistent yet vexed fascination with English domesticity and female creativity by juxtaposing the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, two popular Victorian novelists, against Woolf s own novels and essays. Blair then traces unacknowledged lines of influence and complex interpretations that Woolf attempted to disavow. While reconsidering Woolf s analysis of women and fiction, Blair simultaneously deepens our appreciation of Woolf s work and advances our understanding of feminine aesthetics.
Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language by
"A passionate, political and provocative study" Patricia Clements, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta, and founding director of The Orlando Project Times Higher Education Magazine "The distillation of many years of sparklingly erudite scholarship and continuing incisive debate, Judith Allen's book is essential reading for anyone concerned by current and disturbing ramifications of the politics of language and the language of politics in the modern world. She provides a generously open guide to many of Woolf's most influential essays as well as to her major manifestos, A Room of One's Ownand Three Guineas" Dr Jane Goldman, Reader in English Literature, University of Glasgow "Guided by Montaigne's trenchant question, 'What do I know?', Judith Allen shows how the lexicon of war in the twenty-first century can be revealed in all its lamentable 'truthiness' by paying attention to what Virginia Woolf's essays have to say about the power of language to transform our world. This is a book that makes refreshingly clear Woolf's deep political engagement with the urgent issues of war and peace." Mark Hussey, Editor, Woolf Studies Annual Judith Allen's timely study ranges from Michel de Montaigne to Jon Stewart, from the Northcliffe Press empire of World War I to Rupert Murdoch's current media empire, and explores the increasing influence of social media. Allen approaches Woolf as a theorist of language as well as a theorist of reading, and shows how her writing strategies - sometimes single, resonant words - function to express and enact her politics. Close readings of many essays, including 'Montaigne' and 'Craftsmanship', reveal how Woolf's complex arguments serve to awaken her readers to the complexities and power of language.
Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style by
This readable, informed, and insightful book illustrates the effects Virginia Woolf's feminism had on her art. Woolf's committed feminism combined with her integrity as an artist and her ability to metamorphose ideology into art make her work particularly suitable for a study of the complex relationship of polemic to aesthetics. There is hardly a more crucial issue for the feminist artist today, who must seek a successful fusion of her principles with her art. For the student of this art Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style provides a means to evaluate the success or failure of these strategies. While Woolf's essays reflect a strong if somewhat quirky feminism, she was highly critical of didacticism in fiction. For that reason her novels at first glance appear relatively free of polemic. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style reveals that her feminism is more accurately described as latent in the novels, having been merged into the aesthetic components of style, structure, point of view, and patterns of imagery.
Virginia Woolf and the Victorians by
Criticism of Woolf is often polarised into viewing her work as either fundamentally progressive or reactionary. In this 2007 book, Steve Ellis argues that her commitment to anxiety about modernity coexists with a nostalgia and respect for aspects of Victorian culture threatened by radical social change. Ellis tracks Woolf's response to the Victorian era through her fiction and other writings, arguing that Woolf can be seen as more 'Post-Victorian' than 'modernist'. He explains how Woolf's emphasis on continuity and reconciliation related to twentieth-century debates about Victorian values, and he analyses her response to the First World War as the major threat to that continuity. This detailed and original investigation of the range of Woolf's writing attends to questions of cultural and political history and fictional structure, imagery and diction. It proposes a fresh reading of Woolf's thinking about the relationships between the past, present and future.
Virginia Woolf in Context by
As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context - whether historical, cultural, or theoretical - is to be understood in relation to her work and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender and class and the bearings of colonialism, empire and war.
Virginia Woolf Reader by
This rich introduction to the art of Virginia Woolf contains the complete texts of five short stories and eight essays, together with substantial excerpts from the longer fiction and nonfiction. An ideal volume for those encountering Woolf for the first time as well as for those already devoted to her work. Edited and with a Preface by Mitchell A. Leaska.
