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The renaissance of Virginia Woolf reflects a reassessment not only of Woolf as a writer but also of our social and political life as a whole. It points up differences between English and American readers, between older and younger critics, between men and women. Particularly striking in the revaluation is a tendency to approach Woolf as a soliloquist, a person, rather than as a detached and formal artist. In this collection, Ralph Freedman has brought together some of Woolf's most interesting commentators, whose varied concerns, traditional and modern, demonstrate the vitality and scope of Woolf criticism. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity contains essays by Ralph Freedman, Harvena ...
Crafting Feminism develops a dynamic study of craft and art-making in modern and contemporary feminist writing. In evocative readings of literary works from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith, this book expands our sense of transartistic modernist scholarship to encompass process-oriented and medium-specific analyses of textile arts, digital design, collage, photography, painting, and sculpture in literary culture. By integrating these craft practices into the book's enlightening archive, Elkins's theoretical argument extends a reading of craft metaphors into the material present. Crafting Feminism demonstrates how writers have engaged with handiwork across generations and have undertaken the cra...
SHAW 21 offers readers an eclectic perspective on Shaw, his works, and his contemporaries. Basil Langton, actor and director, reminisces about his early development as an actor, his meeting with Shaw, and his career as director of many of Shaw's plays. He focuses upon Shaw's stagecraft, augmenting his views with those of Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, whom he interviewed in 1960. Galen Goodwin Longstreth analyzes the correspondence between Shaw and Ellen Terry and argues that the exchange is itself a literary genre, a dramatic performance that reveals their personal identities. The next two contributors, Stanley Weintraub and Andrea Adolph, examine the Shaw/Virginia Woolf relationship...
After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war.
Focusing on the early Modern and Victorian periods, the author finds covert revolutionaries in four familiar practitioners of a strategy she calls creative negativity: poet-photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), novelist-essayist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), activist-spiritual leader Annie Besant (1847-1933), and actress-writer Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952).
Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries helps us comprehend the ways that women writers and artists contributed to and complicated modernism by contextualizing them alongside Woolf's work.
The Caribbean Islands have long been an uneasy meeting place among indigenous peoples, white European colonists, and black slave populations. Tense oppositions in Caribbean culture—colonial vs. native, white vs. black, male conqueror vs. female subject—supply powerful themes and spark complex narrative experiments in the fiction of Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys. In this pathfinding study, Mary Lou Emery focuses on Rhys's handling of these oppositions, using a Caribbean cultural perspective to replace the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards that have served to misread and sometimes devalue Rhys's writing. Emery considers all five Rhys novels, beginning with Wi...
This elegantly written and richly detailed biography tells the story of Virginia Woolf's last ten years, from the creation of her great visionary novel, The Waves, to her suicide in 1941. Herbert Marder looks closely at Woolf's views on totalitarianism and her depictions of Britain under siege to create a remarkable portrait of a mature and renowned writer during a time of rising fascist violence.An awareness of personal danger, Marder says, colored Woolf's actions and consciousness in the years leading up to World War II. She practiced her art with intense dedication and was much admired for her wit and vivacity. But she had previously tried to kill herself, and she asserted her right to di...