Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
International Reputation

The Introduction outlines the scope and range of this study of perfume in Victorian literary culture, defining its terms and explaining its specific links with aestheticism and decadence during 1860–1900, the period in which British perfumery developed, expanded, and gained an international reputation. It also explains the important links between perfume and literary language, surveys various kinds of modern writing about smell and perfume, and indicates the relatively small amount of critical writing on olfaction in Victorian literature. Finally, signalling the broadly chronological organization of this monograph, it provides detailed chapter summaries which trace an evolutionary movement from Romantic poetry and early and mid-Victorian fiction to aestheticism, decadence, and the literature of the fin de siècle, ending with Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie, two early twentieth-century novelists whose works provide contrasting reactions to Victorian scented literature and perfumed decadence.

Victorian Drydown and Sillage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle

This chapter considers the reception of the Victorian perfumed legacy by examining two contrasting early twentieth-century literary responses to perfume and decadence by Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie. Woolf had little personal contact with the culture of decadence, her diary displaying her puritanism and distrust of perfume. Later in life her novel Flush (1933) allows her a rapprochement with Victorian literature and smell, while her memoirs show her becoming more accommodating of her sensory self. In contrast, Mackenzie had a relaxed attitude towards Victorian decadence, perfume, and smell, and enjoyed the literature of the fin de siècle. This liberal response is expressed in his autobiography, various essays, and his two most important early novels Carnival (1912) and Sinister Street (1913–14), where his protagonists reveal his skill as an ‘aromancer’, adept at using scented memories and impressions to underscore the key moments and experiences in an individual’s life.

Scents and Sensibility

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Algernon Charles Swinburne ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Michael Field ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
Romantic Poetry

A major reconceptualization of the imagination that reinstates its hidden links with the historically neglected sense of smell, this book is the first to examine the role played by scent and perfume in Victorian literary culture. Perfume-associated notions of imaginative influence and identity are central to this study, which explores the unfamiliar scented world of Victorian literature, concentrating on texts associated with aestheticism and decadence, but also noting important anticipations in Romantic poetry and prose, and earlier Victorian poetry and fiction. Throughout, literary analysis is informed by extensive reference to the historical and cultural context of Victorian perfume. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things such as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

scholarly journals Tracing the lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 47-56
Author(s):  
Mykola Verbovyi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Quantitative Composition ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Lexical Composition

The article analyzes the most important lexical features of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works of art. The researcher concludes that the playwright in his texts used words or individual forms characteristic of the steppe subdialects of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century. The analysis of words is made with the involvement of a wide range of factual material extracted from various lexicographical, ethnographic sources, as well as artistic texts of other authors. It has been established that the lexical composition of Marko Kropyvnytskyi’s works reveals organic connections with the vocabulary of the adjacent Poltava and Podil dialects, and more broadly with the eastern and western dialects of the Ukrainian language. It is also noted that the analyzed words show a significant influence on the steppe subdialects and on the Ukrainian language in general Polish, Russian and Romanian. Thus, the study suggests that the playwright’s literary texts recorded and preserved the original local phonetic, word-forming or semantic derivatives that complement and deepen our knowledge of general trends in the lexical systems of Eastern Ukrainian dialects and the Ukrainian literary language. Consideration of only a small number of words (approximately 20 nouns) that function in the works of Marko Kropyvnytskyi, determines the prospects for further research to establish the quantitative composition of such names and a systematic description of phonetic, word-forming or semantic features in connection with other dialects and literary language. It follows from the above that the texts of M. Kropyvnytskyi are an important source for the study of linguistic features and steppe subdialects, and the Ukrainian literary language of the early twentieth century.

Modernist Physics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Crowd Psychology

Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.

Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and British Modernism

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Davison-Pégon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Strategic Marketing ◽  
British Modernism ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Mediator

This article examines S. S. Koteliansky as cultural mediator involved not only in the translation of Russian classics, but in strategic marketing ploys and post-revolutionary activism, shaping the cultural attitudes of early twentieth-century London. It starts from his networks in Whitehall, Westminster, and Bloomsbury, before appraising the tactics of enjoining writers to translate and publish the texts he was bringing to Britain. It then turns to the poetics of co-authored translations. Brief extracts from ‘Stavrogin's Confession’, the suppressed chapters of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, translated in 1922 in collaboration with Virginia Woolf, reveal a distinctly modernist attention to voice.

Dissenting Traditions and Missionary Imaginations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin D. Livingstone
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe ◽  
Directing Attention ◽  
Independence Movements ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter follows the long arc of the ‘missionary novel’, from the exhortation and promotion emanating from a missionary culture embraced by a Protestant Christendom to a dissenting literary culture under siege from imperial servants, secularists, and postcolonial independence movements. It notes that the African missionary novel in particular provides fertile material for the investigation of Dissenting Protestantism as it engaged with the twentieth century. Many ‘humanitarian’ novels disseminated knowledge about mission fields and ‘new’ peoples, and so were part of (and criticized for) the globalizing imagination of early twentieth-century Europe and the spread of the professions. Case studies include Elsie Milligan, Arthur E. Southon, Ambrose Haynes, Marion Percy Williams, Arthur Chirgwin, Harry H. Johnston, and Joyce Cary, among others. The chapter extends the debate on mission and empire by directing attention to issues of postcolonial reception, disclosing the ways in which the so-called ‘dissidence of Dissent’ was both challenged and appropriated by anti-colonial authors in the mid to late twentieth century.

The Reception of Virginia Woolf and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Australia

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
Suzanne Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Student Thesis ◽  
Australian Universities ◽  
Ebb And Flow

This chapter surveys Woolf’s reputation in Australia from the 1920s to the 1970s as it was moulded by colonial cultural politics. The competing influences of cosmopolitanism and nationalism shaped the ebb and flow of Woolf’s reception in Australia during these decades. The rise of the more nationalist Leavisite curriculum in Australian universities from the later 1930s, coupled with ambivalent responses to Woolf’s death in 1941, led to more a more divisive reception of Woolf and modernism in Australia in the mid-century. Australian literary critics Nettie Palmer and Margaret (Margot) Hentze espoused a cosmopolitanism that they found reflected in Woolf’s work, a focus also embraced by Nuri Mass, who, in 1942, submitted the first student thesis on Woolf at University of Sydney. Finally, the chapter examines how three women Australian painters, including Grace Cossington Smith, were influenced by Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Fiona Cox ◽  
Elena Theodorakopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
Claude Cahun

The first half of this introduction provides some context for the variety of women’s responses to the Homeric epics discussed in the volume by tracing the origins of these responses back to earlier authors including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and Claude Cahun. It also discusses the paucity of critical attention paid to women’s receptions of Homer, and demonstrates how much is to be gained by rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey through the work of women writers since the early twentieth century. The second half offers an overview of the approaches and figures selected for discussion, women as diverse as Simone Weil and Kate Tempest, as Francisca Aguirre and Barbara Köhler, working in a variety of genres and radically altering the landscape of classical reception.

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