These six essential essays capture Woolf at her best, exploring modern consciousness through the prism of 1930s London while simultaneously painting an intimate, touching portrait of this sprawling metropolis and its fascinating inhabitants. Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Working at the crossroads of contemporary geographical and cultural theory, the book explores how social spaces function as sites which foreground D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf's critiques of the social order and longings for change. Looking at various social spaces from homes to nations to utopian space brought into the here and now the book shows the ways in which these writers criticize and deconstruct the contemporary symbolic, physical, and discursive spatial topoi of the dominant socio-spatial order and envision a more liberating and inclusive human geography. In addition, the book calls for the need to redress the tendency of some spatial theories to underestimate the political potential of literary discourse about space, instead of simply and mechanically appropriating some theoretical concepts to literary criticism. One of the central findings in the book, therefore, is that literary texts can perform subversive interventions in the production of social space through their critical interaction with dominant spatial codes.
Gathers Poe's essays on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, the role of the critic, leading nineteenth-century writers, and the New York literary world.
In the mid-twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published ‘Six Articles on London Life’ in Good Housekeeping magazine, a popular magazine where fashion, cookery and house decoration is largely featured. This first book-length study of what Woolf calls ‘little articles’ proposes to reassess the commissioned essays and read them in a chronological sequence in their original context as well as in the larger context of Woolf’s work. Drawing primarily on literary theory, intermedial studies, periodical studies and philosophy, this volume argues the essays which provided an original guided tour of London are creative and innovative works, combining several art forms while developing a photographic method. Further investigation examines the construct of Woolf’s essays as intermedial and as partaking both of theory and praxis; intermediality is closely connected here with her defense of a democratic ideal, itself grounded in a dialogue with her forebears. Far from being second-rate, the Good Housekeeping essays bring together aesthetic and political concerns and come out as playing a pivotal role: they redefine the essay as intermedial, signal Woolf’s turn to a more openly committed form of writing, and fit perfectly within Woolf’s essayistic and fictional oeuvre which they in turn illuminate.
'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.' According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.' One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing skills across a wide range of subjects, with all the craftsmanship, substance, and rich allure of her novels. This selection brings together thirty of her best essays, including the famous 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', a clarion call for modern fiction. She discusses the arts of writing and of reading, and the particular role and reputation of women writers. She writes movingly about her father and the art of biography, and of the London scene in the early decades of the twentieth century. Overall, these pieces are as indispensable to an understanding of this great writer as they are enchanting in their own right. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Originally published in 1984, Virginia Woolf: Guide to Research is a bibliographic guide to the writings and critical reception of the works of Virginia Woolf. The guide is a simply organized guide that makes easily accessible, a diversified body of critical works on Virginia Woolf. The scholarship is organised into key collections, based around Woolf’s major works of fiction, and contains studies from a variety of content, including periodicals, articles, book chapters as well as foreign-language books.
Sixteen leading scholars explore the richness of King James's work from a variety of perspectives, and in so doing seek to establish monarchic writing as an important genre in its own right. Best known for his landmark version of the Protestant Bible, James VI (1566-1625) of Scotland, who succeeded Elizabeth I to the English throne, was truly a monarch of the word. From religious prose and verse to political treatises and social works to love poems and witty doggerel, James used writing and the print media to inspire his subjects, govern them, keep his enemies at bay, and even examine his own authority. Until now, the full span of James's work has received little critical attention by political and literary historians. In Royal Subjects, sixteen leading scholars explore the richness of his oeuvre from a variety of perspectives, and in so doing seek to establish monarchic writing as an important genre in its own right. Through its unprecedented look at monarchic writing, Royal Subjects not only enriches our understanding of the reign of James VI and I but also offers fruitful suggestions for approaches to other Renaissance texts and other periods.
First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something through something else: they are the projected imagination, through reading, of the reading by the self and/or others (a wide range of each) of a city, or cities as such, of what city-knowing or city-thinking is. The city as stage, market, and labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors from Cicero to Kazin, from Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, and Woolf, to Williams, Ashbery, and Bonnefoy, is the place the essays play themselves out, through architecture and metaphor.