Laura Marcus

Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press

In her diary entry for Monday, 25 January 1915, her thirty-third birthday, Virginia Woolf, describing her birthday ‘treats’, wrote: I don’t know when I enjoyed a birthday so much – not since I was a child anyhow. Sitting at tea we decided three things: in the first place to take Hogarth [House, Richmond], if we can get it; in the second, to buy a Printing press; in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am very much excited at the idea of all three – particularly the press. I was also given a packet of sweets to bring home.

The Victorian fin de siècle and Decadence

The modern roots of Decadence were in 1830s American Gothic and late Romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe elevated disease, perversity and decay to new heights of artistic expression. Alfred Tennyson’s Poems of 1832, the poems of languor rather than of politics – ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ and ‘The Palace of Art’ – evoked a philosophy of Inaction that would later be elaborated in Oscar Wilde’s Intentions (1891) and in the American Ralph Cram’s The Decadent: The Gospel of Inaction (1893). Although Poe’s success in the United States was trivial until he was discovered by Charles Baudelaire, his perversity and Tennyson’s celebrity – in the words of the latter’s Ulysses ‘I am become a name’ – were the two touchstones of Decadence: the naturalistic uniqueness of the individual psyche and the recognition of ‘brand’ or personal commodification that would be central to modern consciousness. Baudelaire took up the first in Les Fleurs du Mal, censored by the French state in 1857, and the latter in the figure of the Dandy in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). Baudelaire began translating Poe (culminating in 5 volumes) in 1848, and thereby turned from Romantic nature to urban perspectives and personalities. His successor, Stephane Mallarme, known as the founder of French Symbolism, took up objects as well, and infused them with non-material properties as a counter to a too-materialistic age. In his ‘Further Notes on Edgar Poe’ (1857), Baudelaire reappropriated the intentionally negative phrase of his critics, ‘a literature of decadence’, in a revolutionary, affirmative way to describe a literary progress (ironically parodying the great theme of the age) from infancy, through childhood and adolescence, towards a mature Decadence.

Modern life: fiction and satire

The epoch between the end of World War I and that of World War II is framed by two of the landmark prose satires of the century. However, while Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918) is an uncompromising product of the Modernist avant-garde, George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) employs the traditional form of the fable to put across its complex critique of revolutionary socialism with almost populist clarity, the epitome, in every way (apart from its brevity) of all that High Modernism spurned. Other satires of note appeared in the interim, so although the 1918–45 period is most strikingly an era of ambitious rebuilding in Anglo-Irish fiction, with Joyce and Woolf as its leading architects, it is hardly less boldly a time of demolition (both of the certainties of the past and the enthusiasms of the present), with Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh as its foremost iconoclasts. Moreover, although the type of social satire with which these three novelists are associated largely dies out by the mid-1930s (before resurfacing, mutatis mutandis , in the 1950s novels of Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson), a satirical spirit pervades the period’s literature and is evident, for example, in Ulysses , Jacob’s Room , The Waste Land, Orlando , Finnegans Wake and Between the Acts . ‘Imuch doubt that any young person of our time can be impressed by a poem, a painting, or a piece of music that is not flavored with a dash of irony’, the cultural critic Jose Ortegay Gasset remarked in 1925.

Staging the ‘Private Theatre’: Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie

The phrase ‘private theatre’ comes from Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria (1895), in which it is used by one of Breuer’s women patients, Bertha Pappenheim, known as ‘Anna O’: This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family. She embellished her life in a manner which probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness, by indulging in systematic day-dreaming, which she described as her ‘private theatre’. While everyone thought she was attending, she was living through fairy-tales in her imagination, but she was always on the spot when she was spoken to, so that no one was aware of it. She pursued this activity almost continuously while she was engaged on her household duties, which she discharged unexceptionally … this habitual day-dreaming while she was well passed over into illness without a break.2

Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction

Introduction 1: Confession, Conversion, Testimony 2: The Journeying Self 3: Autobiographical Consciousness 4: Autobiography and psychoanalysis 5: Family Histories and the Autobiography of Childhood 6: Public Selves 7: Self-portraiture, photography and performance References Further Reading Index

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

The writer in film: authorship and imagination

The relationship between the visual and the verbal, image and word, has been the ground of longstanding aesthetic debate. The representation of literary authorship in film bears on this in close and complex ways. This chapter considers a number of films and texts in which the transition between book and film, word and image, is foregrounded both thematically and through formal strategies. The focus of the chapter will be on recent film and literature, though there will also be some discussion of the ways in which authorship is represented in earlier cinema. One significant contrast to which this discussion will point is early film’s use of the dissolve, or similar modes of signalling transition, to represent the move from the authorial mind/hand to his or her created world, actualized in film. In recent cinema, by contrast, there has been a tendency to break down the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ worlds, so that ‘the author’ becomes part of, and subject to, the dimensions of the fictional world.

‘From autumn to spring, aesthetics change’: Modernity's Visual Displays

Early theorizations of how cinema trained the eye to new space and movement are at the centre of this article’s interest. It uses them to explore the new pictorial languages of modernity, investigating how, and with what effect, they connected text, film, and advertising.

European Witness: Analysands Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s

The emigration, voluntary or enforced, of psychoanalysts from central Europe to Britain and the United States from the 1930s onward has been explored in depth and detail over the last decades, with important work on, among related topics, “Freud in exile.”1 Less fully documented and explored are the experiences, in the 1920s and 1930s, of those British analysands and training analysts who traveled to Vienna, Berlin, or Budapest in order to be analyzed by “the masters,” including Freud in Vienna, Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest, and Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs in Berlin. While it is recognized that this was a familiar pattern in the training of early British analysts, the particularities of their experiences abroad (as well as those of analysands who were “patients” rather than “pupils,” to use Freud’s distinction) appear not to have been a significant focus of interest. This chapter is a preliminary exploration of this topic, and focuses on the activities of the Stracheys, particularly Alix Strachey, and of the writers Bryher and H.D., in the Berlin of the mid-1920s and the Berlin and Vienna of the late 1920s and early 1930s, respectively.

Virginia Woolf and Digression: Adventures in Consciousness

The development of Virginia Woolf’s fiction is frequently framed, as it was by Woolf herself, as a movement away from the more conventional realist modes of the first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), to the experiments with the novel form, the search for ‘new names’, as she wrote in her 1927 essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ (Woolf 1994: 435), and new shapes for the novel, inaugurated in her third novel Jacob’s Room (1922). Her early short stories played a crucial role in this process of reinvention. Writing in her diary of her plan for Jacob’s Room to be a novel without ‘scaffolding […] all crepuscular’, Woolf stated that she conceived of three of the stories written in the late 1910s and early 1920s — ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘An Unwritten Novel’ — as ‘taking hands and dancing in unity’ (Woolf 1981: 13–14).