Woolfian Boundaries explores Woolf’s work from perspectives “beyond the boundary” of her own positions and attitudes, taking her coolness toward the provinces and “prejudice” against the regional novel (Letters 6: 381) as the starting point for considering her writing in the light of its own “limits,” self-declared and otherwise. Chapter topics range from Woolf’s connections with the “Birmingham School” of novelists in the 1930s to her interests in environmentalism, portraiture, photography, and the media, and her endlessly fascinating relationship with the writings of her contemporaries and predecessors.
Rescues the particularities of Virginia Woolf's political and social participation, tracing her career as an activist across forty-five yearsClara Jones re-reads Woolf's fiction and non-fiction in light of her examination of the details of Woolf's involvement with Morley College, the People's Suffrage Federation, the Women's Co-operative Guild and the National Federation of Women's Institutes. Drawing on extensive archival research into these organisations, Jones also positions Woolf's activism with regard to the institutional contexts in which she worked. Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist demonstrates the degree to which Woolf was sensitive to the internal politics and conflicts of the bodies she was associated with and the ways in which she interrogated her ambivalent attitudes towards her activism throughout her literary career.Focusing on texts that represent the range of Woolf's literary output, this book includes essays, unpublished sketches, Woolf's social realist 1919 novel Night and Day, and her final, visionary novel Between the Acts. This approach to Woolf's writing takes an integrated view, incorporating her juvenilia and foregrounding Woolf's critically neglected early novels. Rather than offering readings of Woolf's well-known 'political' works, Jones instead uncovers the unexpected ways in which Woolf's activism made its way into unlikely texts.Key FeaturesIncludes two new transcriptions of material by Woolf: the 'Report on Teaching at Morley College' ('Morley Sketch') and the 'Cook Sketch'Provides insights into the histories of neglected institutions through accounts of Woolf's activismExplores a range of texts, reading across genres with an alertness to class and gender politics in each case
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's career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. In large part for feminist reasons, Woolf promoted the triumph of the novel over poetry, even as she adapted some of poetry's techniques for the novel in order to portray the inner life. Woolf considered poetry the rival form to the novel. A monograph on Woolf's sense of genre rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Drawing on unpublished archival material and little-known publications, the book combines biography, book history, formal analysis, genetic criticism, source study, and feminist literary history. Woolf's attitude towards poetry is framed within contexts of wide scholarly interest: the decline of the lyric poem, the rise of the novel, the gendered associations with these two genres, elegy in prose and verse, and the history of English Studies. Virginia Woolf and Poetry makes three important contributions. It clarifies a major prompt for Woolf's poetic prose. It exposes the genre rivalry that was creatively generative to many modernist writers. And it details how holding an ideology of a genre can shape literary debates and aesthetics.
Edited collection from acclaimed contemporary Woolf scholars, focusing on urban issues. These include addressing the ethical and political implications of Virginia Woolf's work, a move that suggests new insights into Woolf as a "real world" and social critic.
The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts is the most authoritative and up-to-date guide to Virginia Woolf's artistic influences and associations. In original, extensive and newly researched chapters by internationally recognised authors, the Companion explores Woolf's ideas about creativity and the nature of art in the context of the recent 'turn to the visual' in modernist studies with its focus on visual technologies and the significance of material production. The in-depth chapters place Woolf's work in relation to the most influential aesthetic theories and artistic practices, including Bloomsbury aesthetics, art and race, Vanessa Bell and painting, art galleries, theatre, music, dance, fashion, entertaining, garden and book design, broadcasting, film, and photography. No previous book concerned with Woolf and the arts has been so wide ranging or has paid such close attention to both public and domestic art forms.Illustrated with 16 olour as well as 39 black and white illustrations and with guides to further reading, the Companion will be an essential reference work for scholars, students and the general public.Key Features* An essential reference tool for all those working on or interested in Virginia Woolf, the arts, visual culture and modernist studies* Provides a new intellectual framework for the exciting discoveries of the past decades*Draws on archival and historical research into Virginia Woolf's manuscripts and her Bloomsbury milieu*Original chapters from expert contributors newly commissioned by Maggie Humm, widely known for her important work on Virginia Woolf and visual culture*Combines broad synthesis and original reflection setting Woolf's work in historical, cultural and artistic contexts
This multi-authored volume focuses on Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press (1917-1941). Scholars from the UK and the US use previously unpublished archival materials and new methodological frameworks to explore the relationships forged by the Woolfs
