A delightful collection of essays penned by Woolf for what she saw as the common reader. An informal, informative and witty celebration of our literary and social heritage.
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)
In the first comprehensive study of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader, Katerina Koutsantoni draws on theorists from the fields of sociology, sociolinguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism to investigate the thematic pattern underpinning these books with respect to the persona of the 'common reader'. Though these two volumes are the only ones that Woolf compiled herself, they have seldom been considered as a whole. As a result, what they reveal about Woolf's position with regard to the processes of writing, reading, and critical analysis has not been fully examined. Koutsantoni challenges the critical commonplace that equates Woolf's strategy of self-effacement and personal removal from her works as a necessary compromise that allowed her to achieve authorial recognition in a male-dominated context. Rather, Koutsantoni argues that an investigation of impersonality in Woolf's essays reveals the potential of the genre to function both as a vehicle for the subjective and dialogic expression of the author and reader and as a venue for exploring topics with which the ordinary reader can relate. As she explores and challenges the meaning of impersonality in Woolf's Common Reader, Koutsantoni shows how the related issues of subjectivity, authority, reader-response, intersubjectivity, and dialogism offer useful perspectives from which to examine Woolf's work.
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.
This collection addresses such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf's reception as a world writer, world wars and the centenary of the First World War, and natural worlds in Woolf's writings. The selected papers represent the major themes of the conference as well as a diverse range of contributors from around the world and from different positions in and outside the university. The contents include familiar voices from past conferences--e.g., Judith Allen, Eleanor McNees, Elisa Kay Sparks--and well-known scholars who have contributed less frequently, if at all, to past Selected Papers--e.g., Susan Stanford Friedman, Steven Putzel, Michael Tratner--as well as new voices of younger scholars, students, and independent scholars. The volume is divided into four themed sections. The first and longest section, War and Peace, is framed by Mark Hussey's keynote roundtable, War and Violence, and Maud Ellmann's keynote address, Death in the Air: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner in World War II. The second section, World Writer(s), includes papers that read the Woolfs in a global context. The papers in Animal and Natural Worlds bring recent developments in ecocriticism and post-humanist studies to analysis of Woolf's writing of human and nonhuman worlds. Finally, Writing and Worldmaking addresses various aspects of genre, style, and composition. Madelyn Detloff's closing essay, The Precarity of 'Civilization' in Woolfs Creative Worldmaking, brings us back to international and cultural conflicts in our own day, reminding us, as Detloff says, why Woolf still matters today.
At the turn of the 20th century, printing and photographic technologies evolved rapidly, leading to the birth of mass media and the rise of the amateur photographer. Demonstrating how this development happened symbiotically with great changes in the shape of British literature, Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880-1920 explores this co-evolution, showing that as both writing and photography became tools of mass dissemination, literary writers were forced to re-evaluate their professional and personal identities. Focusing on four key authors-Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf-each of which had their own private and professional connections to photographs, this book offers valuable historical contexts for contemporary cultural developments and anxieties. At first establishing the authors' response to developing technologies through their non-fiction, personal correspondences and working drafts, Ennis moves on to examine how their perceptions of photography extend into their major works of fiction: A Laodicean, Dracula, The Secret Agent, The Inheritors and The Voyage Out. Reflecting on the first 'graphic revolution' in a world where text and image are now reproduced digitally and circulated en masse and online, Ennis redirects our attention to when image and text appeared alongside each other for the first time and the crises this sparked for authors: how they would respond to increasingly photographic depictions of everyday life, and in turn, how their writing adapted to a distinctly visual mass media.
With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for scholars and graduate students. Feminist to the core, each chapter examines an aspect of Woolf's achievement and legacy. Each contribution offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Six sections focus on Woolf's life, her texts, her experiments, her life as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf's life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. The section on her works moves chronologically, emphasizing Woolf's practice of writing essays and reviews alongside her fiction. Chapters on Woolf's experimentalism pay special attention to the literariness of Woolf's writing, with opportunity to trace its distinctive watermark while 'Professions of Writing', invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the TLS. The 'Contexts' section moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with the natural world as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. The final section on afterlives demonstrates the many ways Woolf's reputation continues to grow, across the globe, and across media, in ideas and in artistic expression. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.
This book explores how the publication of women’s life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century. It provides case studies of Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and Mary Hays, four writers whose names were caught up in debates about the moral and literary respectability of publishing the ‘private’. Focusing on gender, genre and authorship, this study examines key works of life writing by and about these women, and the reception of these texts. It argues for the importance of life writing—a crucial site of affective and imaginative identification—in shaping authorial reputation and afterlife. The book ultimately constructs a fuller picture of the literary field in the long nineteenth century and the role of women writers and their life writing within it.