Jane Goldman

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.

Who Let the Dogs Out? Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, Virginia Woolf and the Little Brown Dog

What sort of company will the Woolf memorial keep among London’s open-air statuary? How does this object square with Woolf’s recorded disdain for public statues, in her London essay,2 “This is the House of Commons” (1932): ‘The days of the small separate statue are over’ (LS, p. 70)? These words share a certain provenance with the bust itself. A replica of an existing bust, completed August 1931, by Stephen Tomlin, Woolf sat for it during the period she was writing her novel Flush and preparing her London essays for Good Housekeeping magazine. Woolf’s pen therefore seems to demolish her own ‘small separate statue’ as she collaborates in its very creation. The reissue of the bust coincides, eerily, with the reissue of Woolf’s London essays.3 A cast already stands in the garden of Monks House (where Woolf’s ashes were scattered); another stands in the National Gallery. The original plaster cast is at Charleston, the Bloomsbury Group House preserved by the nation just as Thomas Carlyle’s Chelsea house has been preserved, itself the focus of another of Woolf’s London essays, “Great Men’s Houses” (1932).

‘I Grow More & More Poetic’: Virginia Woolf and Prose Poetry

This essay begins by considering how we might claim Woolf as a poet in prose and a writer of prose poetry, rather than a poetic novelist. It closes with the findings of research by creative practice, a poem sourced in the systematic harvesting of her journal and diary entries on poets, poetry, and poetics. Observed are attempts, such as that of Jackson Mac Low, to transform Woolf’s writing into poems. Woolf’s ‘BLUE & GREEN’ is analysed as a prose poem, drawing on her readings in French symbolism, and her key essays examining the inter-related work of poetry and prose are also considered. Systematic creative research into her recorded utterances on poetry and poetics evidences that Woolf did ‘grow more & more poetic’ while pioneering a new literary form.

Virginia Woolf and the aesthetics of Modernism

By 1920, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an established novelist already attracting serious critical attention, an accomplished critic, and a fledgling publisher. In the two decades that followed she remained a successful, bestselling author, whose reading public bought and read her work without the benefits, or otherwise, of academic mediation. The Hogarth Press, which she founded with her husband, Leonard Woolf, published most of Woolf’s writings, and therefore she had significant control of the production of her own work and considerable artistic freedom. She was also responsible for publishing numerous other key modernist works, including T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and many of the first English translations of Sigmund Freud, as well as works by Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Katherine Mansfield, and several other important (women) writers of the period.

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.