Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory

Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory
Author: Derek Ryan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748676457

Derek Ryan demonstrates how materiality is theorised in Woolf's writings by focusing on the connections she makes between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter.

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity
Author: R. S. Koppen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2009-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748641564

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity places WoolfA's writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s, and theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.C. Flugel. Bringing together studies in fashion, body culture and modernism, the book explores the modern fascination with sartorial fashion as well as with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice.Fashion was deeply implicated with the nineteenth-century modern and remained in focus for the modernities that continued to be proclaimed in the early decades of the following century. Clothing connects with the modernist topoi of the threshold, the trace and the interface; it is the place where character becomes image and where relations between subject and object, organic and inorganic play themselves out in a series of encounters and ruptures. Clothes also facilitate explorations in modern materialism, for instance as informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. WoolfA's work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, "e;thinking through clothes"e; in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future.Key Features: *Contributes new research to Woolf and Modernism studies*Explores the significance of textual representations of dress and sartorial fashion in modernist literature *Interdisciplinary approach which brings together studies of fashion, culture and literature*Adds a specific author focused analysis to current work on cultural embodiment and performance

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace
Author: Peter Adkins
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2020-07-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1949979385

This volume asks how Woolf conceptualized peace by exploring various experimental forms she created in response to violence and crisis. Across fifteen chapters written by an international array of scholars, this book draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s aesthetics and deepens our understanding of her writing about war, ethics, feminism and European culture.

Virginia Woolf, Literary Materiality, and Feminist Aesthetics

Virginia Woolf, Literary Materiality, and Feminist Aesthetics
Author: Amber Jenkins
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2023-10-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031324919

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 and Heritage

Virginia Woolf and Heritage
Author: Jane De Gay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1942954425

Virginia Woolf was deeply interested in the past - whether literary, intellectual, cultural, political or social - and her writings interrogate it repeatedly. She was also a great tourist and explorer of heritage sites in England and abroad. This book brings together an international team ofworld-class scholars to explore how Woolf engaged with heritage, how she understood and represented it, and how she has been represented by the heritage industry.

Modernism à la Mode

Modernism à la Mode
Author: Elizabeth M. Sheehan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501728164

Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less. By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf
Author: Jeanne Dubino
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748693947

Reconsiders Virginia Woolf's work for the 21st century focusing on coevolution, duality and contradiction. These eleven newly commissioned essays represent the evolution, or coevolution, of Woolf studies in the early twenty-first century. Divided into five parts. Self and Identity; Language and Translation; Culture and Commodification; Human, Animal and Nonhuman; and Genders, Sexualities and Multiplicities, the essays represent the most recent scholarship on the subjective, provisional, and contingent nature of Woolf's work. The expert contributors consider unstable constructions of self and identity, and language and translation from multiple angles, including shifting textualities, culture and the marketplace, critical animal studies, and discourses that fracture and revise gender and sexuality.Key Features: - Extends existing critical work that considers a multiplicity of constructions of Virginia Woolf- Demonstrates original and diverse ways of reading this canonical (and contradictory) author- Explores multiple meanings related to the conjoined, fused, connected and evolving nature of Woolf studies- Considers new configurations, new pairings, and new ways of placing ideas in tension around Woolf's work for a postmodern, postmillennial eraEditor bio: Jeanne Dubino is Professor of English and Global Studies, Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies, Appalachian State University, Boone. Gill Lowe is Senior Lecturer in English at University Campus Suffolk, School of Arts and Humanities, University Campus Suffolk. Vara Neverow is Professor of English and Women's Studies, English Department, Engleman Hall, Southern Connecticut State University. Kathryn Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker

Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker
Author: Veronika Krajícková
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2023-10-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1666942308

Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker: Parallels Between Woolf’s Fiction and Process Philosophy introduces Virginia Woolf as a nondualist and process-oriented thinker whose ideas are, despite no direct influence, strikingly similar to those of Alfred North Whitehead. Veronika Krajíčková argues that in their respective fields, literature and philosophy, Woolf and Whitehead both criticized the materialist turn of their time and attempted to reattribute importance to experience and undermine long-rooted dualisms such as subject and object, the animate and the inanimate, the human and the nonhuman, or the self and the other. By erasing the gaps between these dualities, the two thinkers anticipated the poststructuralist thought with which Woolf has been anachronically associated in the last decades. Krajíčková shows that there is no need to analyze Woolf’s fiction via critical and philosophical theories that developed much later. This book demonstrates that Woolf and Whitehead’s ideas may help us adopt more ecologically friendly, selfless, intersubjective, and harmless modes of being in the present day. Both figures emphasize the intrinsic value and importance of each constituent of reality and teach us to appreciate the aesthetic values dispersed throughout our environment.

Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy

Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy
Author: Elsa Högberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135002273X

Revisiting Virginia Woolf's most experimental novels, Elsa Högberg explores how Woolf's writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Högberg's readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to inhere not just in close relations with the ones we know and love, but primarily within those unsettling encounters which suspend our comfortable sense of ourselves as separate from others and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy locates this radical notion of intimacy at the heart of Woolf's introspective, modernist poetics as well as her ethical and political resistance to violence, aggressive nationalism and fascism. Engaging contemporary theory – particularly the more recent works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – it reads Woolf as a writer and ethical thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to critical debates around intimacy, affect, violence and vulnerability in our own time.

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf
Author: Anne E. Fernald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 689
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198811586

A Handbook on Woolf's achievements as an innovative novelist and pioneering feminist theorist. It studies her life, her works, her relationships with other writers, her professional career, and themes in her work including among others feminism, sexuality, education, and class.