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Stylistic study of Virgina Woolf's fiction. Reading a novel by Virginia Woolf involves an element of `double reflexiveness': first, the reader's interaction with Woolf's words and what they describe, and second, the interaction of these words with the world Woolf perceivedand attempted to represent. Oddvar Holmesland takes this paradox and shows that it is not the invention of recent critics but something of which Woolf herself is well aware. In a number of analyses of Woolf's major works - MrsDalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves - he explores the ambiguity that Woolf's reader must work through in order to reach the insights and rewards that her fiction offers. Professor ODDVAR HOLMESLAND is Professor of English at the University of Tromso, Norway.
Offers a new interpretation of “sympathy” as an instrument for investigating contemporary culture, gender, and visual technique.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1954.
“A truly comprehensive, multi-perspective, and up-to-date survey of the undeniable role of music in Woolf ’s life and writings” (Music and Letters). Through Virginia Woolf's diaries, letters, fiction, and the testimony of her contemporaries, this fascinating volume explores the inspiration and influences of music—from classical through mid-twentieth century—on the preeminent Modernist author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and other masterful compositions. In a letter to violinist Elizabeth Trevelyan, Woolf revealed: “I always think of my books as music before I write them.” In a journal entry she compared herself to an “improviser with [m...
Focusing on the work of T.E. Hulme, the Men of 1914, the Bloomsbury Group, T.S. Eliot, and John Middleton Murry, Gillies convincingly demonstrates that Bergson's theories underlie the literary aesthetics of the period that forms the intellectual basis of modern literature. She then turns her critical eye to five major modernist writers - T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and Joseph Conrad - and provides insightful and detailed Bergsonian readings of their major works. Drawing on material not previously available, Gillies persuasively argues that Bergson was a major intellectual force in British literature during the first thirty years of the twentieth century.
Bryony Randall explores the twin concepts of daily time and of everyday life through the writing of several major modernist authors. The book begins with a contextualising chapter on the psychologists William James and Henri Bergson. It goes on to devote chapters to Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, H. D. and Virginia Woolf. These experimental writers, she argues, reveal everyday life and daily time as rich and strange, not simply a banal backdrop to more important events. Moreover, Randall argues that paying attention to the everyday and daily time can be politically empowering and subversive. The specific social and cultural context of the early twentieth century is one in which the concept of daily time is particularly strongly challenged. By examining Modernism's engagement with or manifestation of this notion of daily time, she reveals a totally new perspective on their concerns and complexities.
The Servants of Desire in Virginia Woolf's Shorter Fiction proposes an insight into the ways in which Virginia Woolf engaged with the questions of how class influences working women's occupation of private and public space and how material privilege or economic distress inhibits or encourages their likelihood of obtaining their intellectual, spiritual, and physical desires. This groundbreaking book uses class as the determining factor to assess how servants and working class women occupy private and public space and articulate or fail to realize their desires. Drawing upon published and unpublished holograph and typescript drafts of the shorter fiction in The Monks House Papers as well as th...
At a time when the study of literature and the literary canon itself are once again the focus of intense debate, Building a Profession offers a retrospective on the early days of Comparative Literature in the United States and on its role in defining literary scholarship in the heady decades following the end of the second World War. Composed of autobiographical sketches by a number of eminent comparatists, chiefly of the generation that has either recently retired or is approaching retirement, it anchors the intellectual and scholarly aspirations of the post-War period, through the personal narratives of those who shared in them and promoted them, in the experience of war, uprooting, racial and religious intolerance or persecution, and a deep longing for peaceful exchange and international understanding. It is both a contribution to the history of literary study in the United States and a record of changes that have taken place in the culture of this country since World War II.
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.