'He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others'. So Virginia Woolf described the 'common reader' for whom she wrote her second series of essays. Here she turns her brilliant eye on novels and poetry from John Donne to Christina Rossetti and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as many others. This is an informal, informative and witty celebration of our literary and social heritage by a writer of genius.
Textual Studies and the Common Reader collects eleven original essays by editors of literary texts and theorists concerned about the implications of what such editors do. The volume's organizing theme is textual studies, the domain of which, in one contributor’s words, is the "genesis, transmission, and editing of texts." The contributors seek to extend the discussion about textual studies beyond any narrow professional scope; thus, none of the essays assumes any training in textual studies. Also, the focus of the book is on the literary genre most familiar to most readers: the novel. Authors discussed include Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Many people read literary works, but few do so with a steady sense of their constructedness as texts--of the ways in which "genesis, transmission, and editing" have shaped them as conveyors of meaning. This book shows that the experience of reading is more rewarding for such awareness.
In 1957, Richard Altick's groundbreaking work The English Common Reader transformed the study of book history. Putting readers at the centre of literary culture, Altick anticipated-and helped produce-fifty years of scholarly inquiry into the ways and means by which the Victorians read. Now, A Return to the Common Reader asks what Altick's concept of the 'common reader' actually means in the wake of a half-century of research. Digging deep into unusual and eclectic archives and hitherto-overlooked sources, its authors give new understanding to the masses of newly literate readers who picked up books in the Victorian period. They find readers in prisons, in the barracks, and around the world, and they remind us of the power of those forgotten readers to find forbidden texts, shape new markets, and drive the production of new reading material across a century. Inspired and informed by Altick's seminal work, A Return to the Common Reader is a cutting-edge collection which dramatically reconfigures our understanding of the ordinary Victorian readers whose efforts and choices changed our literary culture forever.
A far cry from her wistful and introspective fiction, Woolf's essays on literature read as lively, droll, and conversational. These essays focus on famous literary figures as well as the craft of fiction; written in confident but inviting prose designed specifically for what Woolf called the common reader, they interweave biography, wit, social commentary, and literary analysis. Woolf typically seems disinterested in offering definitive arguments or reaching grand conclusions. She instead concerns herself with viewing a given writer or topic from several interpretive angles so that she might reveal as much about her subject as she can in a single essay, to a broad audience consisting of non-academic readers. Favorite essays included "Notes on an Elizabethan Play," "Modern Fiction," "Outlines," and "How it Strikes a Contemporary." (Michael)
This book addresses the gap between print and digital scholarly approaches by combining both praxis and theory in a case study of a new international collaborative digital project, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). MAPP is an international collaborative digital project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, that uses digital tools to showcase archival traces of twentieth-century publishing. The twenty-first century has witnessed, and is living through, some of the most dynamic changes ever experienced in the publishing industry, arguably altering our very understanding of what it means to read a book. This book brings to both general readers and scholarly researchers a new way of accessing, and thereby assessing, the historical meanings of change within the twentieth-century publication industry by building a resource which organises, interacts with, and uses historical information about book culture to narrate the continuities and discontinuities in reading and publishing over the last century.
First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word. With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today. I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”
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.
This book examines early British film and film culture as a substantial context for the emergence of modernism in literature. The study considers Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, and Eliot, and treats literary modernism as a consequence of cinema's new accounts of language, time, collectivity, and the self.
