The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Novels

The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Novels
Author: Ann Ronchetti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1135878374

This book explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. Ann Ronchetti locates the sources of Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family heritage, her exposure to Walter Pater and the aesthetic movement, and the philosophical and aesthetic interests of the Bloomsbury group.

A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own
Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: Modernista
Total Pages: 111
Release: 2024-05-30
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9180949509

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf
Author: Jones Clara Jones
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1474401937

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

Exploring Identity in Literature and Life Stories

Exploring Identity in Literature and Life Stories
Author: Guri Barstad
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2019-07-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527536807

Today, globalization, migration and political polarization complicate the individual’s search for a cohesive identity, making identity formation and transformation key issues in everyday life. This collection of essays highlights a number of the dimensions of identity, including cultural hybridity, religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, sexuality, and childhood, and explores how they are thematized in different narratives. The stories discussed are set in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Haiti, India, Israel, Japan, Polynesia, Norway, Romania, Spain and South Africa, emphasizing today’s international focus on identity. The majority of the contributions here focus on literary texts, while others investigate identity formations in interviews, language corpora, student reading logs, film, theatre and pathographies.

Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot

Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot
Author: Petar Penda
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2017-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498528066

Scrutinizing the aesthetic and ideological in the works by Lawrence, Woolf, and Eliot, this book gives a different perspective on Modernism and what are considered to be its principal features. In that respect, fragmentation, disunity, relativity of things, break with tradition, as well as the depiction of life’s disorder, are disputed and seen as aesthetic means for the promotion of certain ideologies. Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot offers a smooth transition from general discussion and revision of some fixed concepts related to Modernism, through individual authors and their major works to the conclusion where the main findings are summarized and further explicated. Apart from dealing with Modernism in general, Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot presents a somewhat different view on the authors it deals with. They are not only seen as opponents of established religious, political, and social views, but to a certain extent as their perpetrators. This duality concerning their stances is reconciled by their insisting on the aesthetic unity.

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.

Vanessa & Virginia

Vanessa & Virginia
Author: Susan Sellers
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2010-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547393881

This novel of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell “captures the sisters’ seesaw dynamic as they vacillate between protecting and hurting each other” (The Christian Science Monitor). You see, even after all these years, I wonder if you really loved me. Vanessa and Virginia are sisters, best friends, bitter rivals, and artistic collaborators. As children, they fight for the attention of their overextended mother, their brilliant but difficult father, and their adored brother, Thoby. As young women, they support each other through a series of devastating deaths, then emerge in bohemian Bloomsbury, bent on creating new lives and groundbreaking works of art. Through everything—marriage, lovers, loss, madness, children, success and failure—the sisters remain the closest of co-conspirators. But they also betray each other. In this lyrical, impressionistic account, written as a love letter and an elegy from Vanessa to Virginia, Susan Sellers imagines her way into the heart of the lifelong relationship between writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell. With sensitivity and fidelity to what is known of both lives, Sellers has created a powerful portrait of sibling rivalry, and “beautifully imagines what it must have meant to be a gifted artist yoked to a sister of dangerous, provocative genius” (Cleveland Plain Dealer). “A delectable little book for anyone who ever admired the Bloomsbury group. . . . A genuine treat.” —Publishers Weekly

Virginia Woolf Icon

Virginia Woolf Icon
Author: Brenda R. Silver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1999
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780226757469

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.

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.