Bryony Randall

Virginia Woolf in Context

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies.

A Day's Time: The One-Day Novel and the Temporality of the Everyday

Abstract:This essay presents an investigation of the one-day-ness of the one-day novel—to ask what the effects of this temporal frame, in literary form, might be. I approach this question largely through the developing critical field of everyday life studies, in particular on literature and the everyday. There is a surprising paucity of literary criticism focused specifically on the narrative of the single day, and in this essay I launch further discussions of the form, particularly insofar as instances of the one-day novel can also (paradoxically) be read as novels of the everyday. In particular, I argue the one-day novel offers a model for a narrative that operates at a graspably human scale, having a particular capacity to reveal, attend to, and explore the apparently nonproductive or passive elements of everyday life; and that the form also interrogates on the capacity (or otherwise) for individuals to assert agency therein. Finally, I explore the paradoxical future orientation of the apparently bounded and closed single-day narrative structure.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves and the Everyday

In the early days of Woolf criticism, the well-known Woolf scholar Stuart Clarke suggests, it was simple. If a potential reader of Woolf’s fiction were to ask where he or she should start, ‘‘the answer then was that there were three great novels but The Waves was too difficult—so choose between Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. If you didn’t like ’em, Woolf wasn’t for you’’ (3). More recently, a post-postmodern sensibility, together with plenty of elucidating critical work on the novel, make reading The Waves a less daunting prospect, and in any case judgments about what is ‘‘difficult’’ (or indeed ‘‘great’’) are not in critical vogue. Nevertheless, to assert that The Waves is Woolf’s most everyday novel, with all the term’s connotations of ease and familiarity, may seem peculiar, if not perverse. The Waves, it might be objected, is not in any obvious sense ‘‘everyday,’’ whether in content (the lives of six privileged members of the upper-middle-class, living in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century), form (pseudo-monologues interspersed with third-person interludes describing the natural world), or in style. Alex Zwerdling’s judgment that ‘‘[t]he relentlessly elevated discourse of the book denied entry to the prosaic, the comic, the particular’’ may now be twenty-five years old but still resonates through general apprehensions of the book as Woolf’s most inaccessible (12). Suzette Henke’s reading of the text as a ‘‘meditation on ontological trauma’’ is characteristic of more recent critical perspectives taken on this text, focusing on its ethical and philosophical dimensions (124). To be sure, emphasis on its existential concerns is by no means necessarily incompatible with a reading of the text as everyday. Indeed, the everyday has become a crucial concept in philosophical and psychological discourse. But to describe the text as ‘‘everyday,’’ if employing a conventional definition of the term as the taken-for-granted, obvious, concrete, and ordinary, would seem anathema to both early and more recent

'Everything depend[s] on the fashion of narration': women writing women writers in short stories of the fin-de-siecle

Elaine Showalter’s 1993 collection of short stories entitled Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siecle contains 18 stories, three of which — or, put another way, one sixth — have identical themes, and two almost identical plotlines, all three describing the encounter between an aspiring female writer and an established male one. The three stories span a 16-year period; the earliest story, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief’, was published in 1880; ‘Lady Tal’ by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) came out in 1892, and Mabel E. Wotton’s ‘The Fifth Edition’ was published in 1896. The repetition of this particular theme within this landmark anthology is striking, particularly so perhaps to the reader whose first experience of reading stories of this period by women is through this collection. What is more, all three stories focalize their narrative through the male writer figure, whether in a first-or third-person narrative — despite being stories by women writers about women writers.1

Virginia Woolf in Context: List of Contributors

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies.

Virginia Woolf in Context: Theory and Critical Reception

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies.

Virginia Woolf in Context: Contents

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies.

Virginia Woolf in Context: Acknowledgements

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies.

Virginia Woolf in Context: Index

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context – whether historical, cultural, or theoretical – is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies.

“Give him your word”: Legal and Literary Interpretation in Stevie Smith’s “The Story of a Story”

Abstract The British writer Stevie Smith’s short story entitled “The Story of a Story” has a rup- ture at its heart where the law (or that which represents it) tries to define what a particular utterance means, and thereby comes into conflict with nonlegal discourses. In this article I argue that Smith’s story dramatizes the relationship between legal and literary interpretative paradigms at a time (during and just after World War II) when the higher courts of England and Wales were asked to adjudicate on some particularly controversial questions of legal interpretation, in particular for my purposes in the case of Liversidge v. Anderson. Implicitly, I conclude that the protagonist of Smith’s story and Lord Atkin in his dissenting judgment in Liversidge share a resistance to the concentration of powers in one particular arena.