Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere
Author: Melba Cuddy-Keane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2003-08-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113944087X

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere relates Woolf's literary reviews and essays to early twentieth-century debates about the value of 'highbrow' culture, the methods of instruction in universities and adult education, and the importance of an educated public for the realization of democratic goals. By focusing on Woolf's theories and practice of reading, Melba Cuddy-Keane refutes assumptions about Woolf's modernist elitism, revealing instead a writer who was pedagogically oriented, publicly engaged and committed to the ideal of classless intellectuals working together in reciprocal exchange. Woolf emerges as a stimulating theorist of the unconscious, of dialogic reading, of historicist criticism and of value judgments, while her theoretically informed but accessible prose challenges us to reflect on academic writing today. Combining a wealth of historical detail with a penetrating analysis of Woolf's essays, this 2003 study will alter our views of Woolf, of modernism and of intellectual work.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
Author: Susan Sellers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2010-02-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521896940

A revised and fully updated edition, featuring five new chapters reflecting recent scholarship on Woolf.

The History of British Women's Writing, 1920-1945

The History of British Women's Writing, 1920-1945
Author: M. Joannou
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-01-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137292172

Featuring sixteen contributions from recognized authorities in their respective fields, this superb new mapping of women's writing ranges from feminine middlebrow novels to Virginia Woolf's modernist aesthetics, from women's literary journalism to crime fiction, and from West End drama to the literature of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Virginia Woolf Icon

Virginia Woolf Icon
Author: Brenda R. Silver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226757452

The proliferation of Virginia Woolfs in both high and popular culture, she argues, has transformed the writer into a "star" whose image and authority are persistently claimed or challenged in debates about art, politics, gender, the canon, class, feminism, and fashion."--BOOK JACKET.

Woolf and the City

Woolf and the City
Author: Elizabeth F. Evans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 098425983X

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.

Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed

Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed
Author: Kathryn Simpson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-02-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472590686

Virginia Woolf is one of the best-known and most influential modernist writers; an iconic figure, her image and reference to her work and life appear in the most varied of cultural sites. Her writing is, however, in many ways kaleidoscopic and has given rise to a diverse and, sometimes, conflicting body of critical work. Whilst Woolf envisaged that her readers could be 'fellow-worker[s]' in the creative process, there is much to perplex any reader approaching her writing, especially for the first time. Drawing on some of the main critical debates and on Woolf's non-fictional writings, this guide untangles some of the difficulties and perplexities that can prove a barrier to understanding of Woolf's writing. These include aspects of the process of writing (such as narrative techniques, formal structures, characterisation), as well as the thematic concerns so central to Woolf's writing, the cultural context in which it emerged and to recent criticism, including representations of gender and sexuality, class and race.

The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group

The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group
Author: Derek Ryan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350014923

The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group is the most comprehensive available survey of contemporary scholarship on the Bloomsbury Group – the set of influential writers, artists and thinkers whose members included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and David Garnett. With chapters written by world leading scholars in the field, the book explores novel avenues of thinking about these pivotal figures and their works opened up by the new modernist studies. It brings together overview essays with detailed illustrative case studies, and covers topics as diverse as feminism, sexuality, empire, philosophy, class, nature and the arts. Setting the agenda for future study of Bloomsbury, this is an essential resource for scholars of 20th-century modernist culture.

Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Author: Pamela Caughie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135650861

This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon

Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British Literature

Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British Literature
Author: Milena Radeva-Costello
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351658654

Philanthropy and Early Twentieth-Century British Literature explores the relationship between British literature and philanthropy at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the works of E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, W. B. Yeats, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West. This book considers how writers in the modernist period drew on the liberal welfare reforms, the adoption of scientific methods in charity, the Cambridge tradition of public service, the Irish nationalist movement, and the influence of the Victorian woman philanthropist in order to advocate for an individualist art, revolutionize their aesthetics, redefine ideals of hospitality and beneficence, and affirm the national, social, and economic liberation of the modern subject. Contrary to popular interpretations presenting modernism as a break with Victorian values, Dr. Radeva-Costello argues philanthropic engagements are at the heart of early twentieth-century literature. The writers discussed in this book had a sophisticated knowledge of the philanthropy debates and of their power to transform twentieth-century notions about how to govern, how to conceive of national, class, and gender boundaries, and how to market the work of the professional artist in the real world. In keeping with the strong archival and historicizing approach of the "New Modernist Studies" of recent years, this book also analyses the rich contextual detail of early modernist magazines, contemporary and archival periodicals, and government publications.

The Geschlecht Complex

The Geschlecht Complex
Author: Oscar Jansson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501381946

The polysemous German word Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new? Drawing on Barbara Cassin's transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of “philosophizing in languages,” scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete “category problems” in literature, philosophy, media, cinema, politics, painting, theatre, and the performing arts with a range of indispensable excerpts from canonical texts -- by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Apter, Cassin, Cavell, Derrida, Irigaray, Malabou, and Nancy, among others -- the volume presents “the Geschlecht complex” as a condition to become aware of, and in turn, to companionably underwrite any interpretive endeavor. Historically grounded, yet attuned to the particularities of the present, the Geschlecht complex becomes an invaluable mode for thinking and theorizing while ensconced in the urgent immediacy of pressing concerns, and poised for the inevitable complexities of categorial naming and genre discernment that await in the so often inscrutable, translation-resistant twenty-first century.