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.
Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction: Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists provides a chronological investigation of the innovative writing styles of canonical modernist writers to reveal a shift in gendered representations of sexual subjectivity. Positioned at the nexus of studies on the body and sexuality in modernist literature, this book addresses the complex ways that constructions of female sexuality are understood culturally, politically, and epistemologically. Using close reading strategies to identify how modernist authors challenge representations of female positionality as passive, case studies consider how canonical modernist authors – Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett – found new ways to represent women as embodied, sexual, desired, and desiring subjects through prose, poetry, and drama. This book addresses Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), Yeats’ The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Beckett’s Not I (1972), and other dramatic works. By rendering sexuality more obviously as a component of female character, these works of modernist literature shape our understanding of the artistic body as a structure for thinking about "woman" as a linguistic construct and material reality. This study is will be of great interest to scholars in English literature, women and gender studies, and sexuality studies.
Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.
This book interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Woolf's writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press. In bringing to light her embodied literary processes, from drafting and composition to hand-printing and binding, this study foregrounds the interactions between Woolf's modernist experimentation and the visual and material aspects of her printed works. By drawing on the field of print culture, as well as the materialist turn in Woolf scholarship, it explores how her experience in print, book-design and publishing underlines her experimental writing, and how her literary texts are conditioned by the context of their production. This book, therefore, provides new ways of reading Woolf's modernism in the context of twentieth-century print, material, and visual cultures. By suggesting that Woolf's work at the Hogarth Press sensitized her to the significant role the visual aspects of a text play in its system of representation, it also considers the extent to which materiality informs both her work, as well as her engagement with Bloomsbury formalist aesthetics, which often exaggerate the distinction between visual and verbal modes of expression.
Virginia Woolf is one of the best-known and most influential modernist writers; an iconic figure, her image and reference to her work and life appear in the most varied of cultural sites. Her writing is, however, in many ways kaleidoscopic and has given rise to a diverse and, sometimes, conflicting body of critical work. Whilst Woolf envisaged that her readers could be 'fellow-worker[s]' in the creative process, there is much to perplex any reader approaching her writing, especially for the first time. Drawing on some of the main critical debates and on Woolf's non-fictional writings, this guide untangles some of the difficulties and perplexities that can prove a barrier to understanding of Woolf's writing. These include aspects of the process of writing (such as narrative techniques, formal structures, characterisation), as well as the thematic concerns so central to Woolf's writing, the cultural context in which it emerged and to recent criticism, including representations of gender and sexuality, class and race.
Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys explores the postcolonial significance of Rhys’s modernist period work, which depicts an urban scene more varied than that found in other canonical representations of the period. Arguing against the view that Rhys comes into her own as a colonial thinker only in the post-WWII period of her career, this study examines the austere insights gained by Rhys’s active cultivation of her fringe status vis-à-vis British social life and artistic circles, where her sharp study of the aporias of marginal lives and the violence of imperial ideology is distilled into an artistic statement positing the outcome of the imperial venture as a state of homelessness across the board, for colonized and ‘metropolitans’ alike. Bringing to view heretofore overlooked émigré populations, or their children, alongside locals, Rhys’s urbanites struggle to construct secure lives not simply as a consequence of commodification, alienation, or voluntary expatriation, but also as a consequence of marginalization and migration. This view of Rhys’s early work asserts its vital importance to postcolonial studies, an importance that has been overlooked owing to an over hasty critical consensus that only one of her early novels contains significant colonial content. Yet, as this study demonstrates, proper consideration of colonial elements long considered only incidental illuminates a colonial continuum in Rhys’s work from her earliest publications.
Hawthorne wrote much of his major fiction in the decade that the theories of Charles Marie François Fourier crossed the Atlantic and contributed to a wave of communitarian experimentation in the American North. Famously, Hawthorne briefly lived and worked at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist commune that formally converted to Fourierism when he had left and was embroiled in litigation to recover money he had invested in the community. In his fiction, Hawthorne responded directly to Fourierism and its critique of capitalism. He used his experiences at Brook Farm as the inspiration for The Blithedale Romance, and in The House of the Seven Gables cast one of the principal characters as a recovering Fourierist. In The Scarlet Letter he engaged with Fourierist debates on marriage and the regulation of desire. Somewhat on the Community-System examines these interventions, and argues that Hawthorne's fiction both seeks to contain Fourierism and responds to its allure. Moreover, in formulating alternative, morally acceptable utopias (ones that are predicated on middle-class marriage), Hawthorne's fiction appropriates key aspects of Fourierist theory
Beginning with The Portrait of a Lady, this book shows how, in developing his unique form of realism, James highlights the tragic consequences of his American heroine's Romantic imagination, in particular, her Emersonian idealism. In order to expose Emerson's blind spot, a lacuna at the very centre of his New England Transcendentalism, James draws on the Gothic effects of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, thereby producing an intensification of Isabel Archer's psychological state and precipitating her awakening to a fuller, heightened consciousness. Thus Romanticism takes an aesthetic turn, becoming distinctly Paterian and unleashing queer possibilities that are further developed in James's subsequent fiction. This book follows the Paterian thread, leading to The Author of Beltraffio and Théophile Gauthier, and thereby establishing an important connection with French culture. Drawing on James's famous analogy between the art of fiction and the art of the painter, the book explores a possible link to the Impressionist painters associated with the literary circle Émile Zola dominated. It then turns to A New England Winter, a tale about an American Impressionist painter, and finds traces leading back to James's initiation prèmiere. The book closes with an exploration of the possible sources of Kate Croy's unspeakable father in The Wings of the Dove and proposes a possible intertext, one that provides direct insight into the Victorian closet.
