Virginia Woolf

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Sellers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Room Of One's Own

This chapter traces Virginia Woolf’s development as a writer of non-fiction, focusing on her prolific output as an essayist. It sees close links between her ongoing experimentation with the novel form and the evolving form of her essays, and argues that her alterations in style were an integral aspect of her attempt to articulate a response to her largely Victorian inheritance, to the seismic shifts taking place in society and understanding in the early decades of the twentieth century, and to the politics and culture of the 1930s dominated by the rise of fascism. While the chapter ranges across all of Woolf’s essays, there is particular discussion of her 1920 A Room of One’s Own and her 1938 Three Guineas.

scholarly journals The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rebekah Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Future Potential

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity.  But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis.  The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>

‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Aesthetics of Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-75
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
The Relationship

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

‘A purse of her own’: Women and Carriage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Female Self ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 2 considers the emergence of the woman’s bag as a subversive emblem for female self-sufficiency from the late nineteenth century. It was an emblem taken up by a number of New Woman writers of fiction and non-fiction, from George Egerton to Nellie Bly. Giving an overview of the historical and rhetorical associations of women with baggage in the context of legal understandings of women’s property rights, the chapter also looks at fin de siècle and early-twentieth-century projections (both in literary works and satirical cartoons) of the disturbance caused by these modern women to traditional chivalry and associated fictional conventions. It asks why women’s portable property was often so pivotal in renderings of this disturbance. More specifically, it hones in on the work of one prominent modernist woman writer, Dorothy Richardson, whose use of a portable model in Pilgrimage goes hand in hand with her reinvention of the female subject. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the problems faced by women beyond the domestic paradigm, considering the woman’s bag as an object of modernist conflict in texts by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

scholarly journals PARA ALÉM DE UM TETO TODO SEU: O CASO ELISA LISPECTOR

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Débora Magalhães Cunha Rodrigues
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Clarice Lispector ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Room Of One's Own

RESUMO: Elisa Lispector escreveu inúmeros romances e contos, recebendo prêmios por alguns deles. A escritora, embora tenha explorado a construção de uma subjetividade feminina, é quase sempre lembrada pelos escritos autobiográficos, principalmente o romance No exílio de 1948. A crítica esteve mais atenta às narrativas que iluminavam episódios da vida de sua irmã caçula, Clarice Lispector, do que às especificidades de sua escrita. A obra e a trajetória de Clarice Lispector causaram sombra não só à obra de sua irmã como às de outras escritoras do mesmo período.  Neste artigo, questionamos o papel da crítica no apagamento do nome de Elisa Lispector na literatura brasileira que tomou o caso Clarice como excepcional, negando às escritoras, de um modo geral, um espaço para debater seus textos e subjetividades. Além da vinculação da obra da escritora à obra de sua irmã pela crítica literária, analisamos como a tradição literária falocêntrica contribuiu para este apagamento. Elisa Lispector contribuiu para o debate acerca do baixo número de publicações de escritoras, evocando Virginia Woolf e Simone de Beauvoir. Atuou para que as escritoras pudessem ter uma tradição em que se ancorar. Analisamos os romances O muro de pedras publicado em 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza de 1965, A última porta de 1975, Corpo a corpo de 1983 e do conto “Uma outra temporada no inferno” de seu último livro O tigre de bengala publicado em 1985, demonstrando como a escritora explorou os processos de emancipação feminina e os conflitos comuns a esta fase de transição.BEYOND A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: THE CASE ELISA LISPECTORABSTRACT: Elisa Lispector has written numerous novels and short stories, receiving awards for some of them. The writer, although she explored the construction of a female subjectivity, is almost always remembered for autobiographical writings, especially the novel No exílio of 1948. The criticism was more attentive to the narratives that illuminated episodes of the life of her younger sister, Clarice Lispector, than to the specificities of her writing. Clarice Lispector's work and trajectory cast a shadow not only on her sister's work but also on those of other writers of the same period. In this article, we question the role of criticism in the elimination of Elisa Lispector's name in Brazilian literature, which took Clarice as exceptional, denying writers, in general, a space to debate their texts and subjectivities. In addition to linking the writer's work to her sister's work by literary criticism, we analyze how the phallocentric literary tradition contributed to this elimination. Elisa Lispector contributed to the debate about the low number of writers' publications, evoking Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. It worked so that the writers could have a tradition in which to anchor themselves. We analyze the novels O muro de pedras published in 1963, O dia mais longo de Thereza of 1965, A última porta of 1975, Corpo a corpo of 1983 and the short story "Uma outra temporada no inferno" from her last book O tigre de bengala published in 1985, demonstrating how the writer explored the processes of female emancipation and the conflicts common to this phase of transition.Keywords: Elisa Lispector; feminist criticism; Brazilian literature.

scholarly journals The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rebekah Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Future Potential

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity.  But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis.  The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>

scholarly journals “It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Leung
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Physical Gestures ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind

The Russian ballet was celebrated amongst the Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth-century. Throughout 1910s-1930s, Virginia Woolf enjoyed Russian ballets such as Petrushka, Le Spectre de la Rose and Scheherazade staged by Michel Fokine and Sergei Diaghilev. The expressivity of the dancing body rectifies words which, as Woolf delineates in “Craftsmanship,” are dishonest in articulating emotions (Selected Essays 85). This paper thus divulges an oppositional thinking that belies Woolf’s modernist aesthetics – a compulsion to give words to emotions that should be left unsaid. In To the Lighthouse (1928), this “silence” is communicated in the dancing gestures that populate the novel. Juxtaposing the context of Woolf’s attendance at the ballet with her concurrent composition of Lighthouse, I shall argue that the aesthetic convergence between Woolf’s prose and the Russian ballet is not a coincidence – that Woolf very much had the ballet in mind when she wrote. Woolf’s and the Russian ballet’s shared aesthetics however, do not characterise this paper as a study of influence the Russian ballet had on Woolf. Rather, Woolf involuntarily deploys the language of dance/ballet in articulating ineffable emotions. I will offer a close reading that scrutinizes the underexplored physical gestures of Mr and Mrs Ramsay with a perspective of dance. In projecting emotions, Woolf’s novel sketches a reciprocal network between the dancing body and the mind. I conclude by suggesting that the communicational lapses do not sentence the failure of but sustain human kinship. By extension, the Russian balletic presentation of the dancing body will also reanimate the mind-body conundrum that has haunted academia for centuries.

Woolf’s Feminism

2021 ◽  
pp. 310-325
Author(s):  
Stephanie J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Married Women ◽  
Women's Issues ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Power Economic

The fullness of Woolf’s engagement with early-twentieth-century feminism has at times been overshadowed by the prominence given A Room of One’s Own, and by longstanding archival obstacles to accessing her extensive work in periodicals. This chapter aims to offer an overview of Woolf’s engagement with British feminism during her lifetime, and to promote a richer conversation about how Woolf’s fiction, journalism, and essays, as well as A Room and Three Guineas, reflect a sustained engagement with, contributions to, and wariness of the feminist concerns of her day. Her responses to women’s suffrage, worker’s rights, the legal status of married women, education, political power, economic parity, and pacifism were unified by her consistent endeavors to draw attention to patriarchy as structuring public perceptions of ‘women’s issues’. (125)

The quiet novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of

This chapter maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and speculates about the potentiality of quiet as a literary aesthetic. It argues that the introvert was a disruptive presence in many nineteenth-century American texts, including those by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville where quiet is associated with a failure to speak or an absence of mind. In the early twentieth century, quiet protagonists were integral to the ‘novel of consciousness’ favoured by many writers including Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust who equated quietness of character with a rich and dramatic internal life. Yet, as the century developed, quiet became marginalised within a Western culture that seemed increasingly defined by its noise and sources of overstimulation. This chapter therefore concludes with a discussion of quiet’s potentiality as both an aesthetic and as a mode of engagement with contemporary fiction.

scholarly journals Virginia Woolf: The Translations of "A Room of One's Own" and "Three Guineas" to Construct a Feminine Genealogy

2020 ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Natalia Colorado Prieto
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Las Mujeres ◽  
Room Of One's Own

En este artículo se lleva a cabo un análisis comparativo de las traducciones al español de los ensayos feministas A Room of One’s Own y Three Guineas de Virginia Woolf, así como un estudio de la correlación entre las ideas feministas de Woolf y la situación de las mujeres españolas en el momento en el que las traducciones fueron publicadas y en la actualidad. El objetivo de este trabajo es determinar hasta qué punto las decisiones de los traductores influyeron en la transmisión del mensaje que pretendía transmitir Woolf, y la conexión entre dichas traducciones y la situación de las mujeres en España en el momento que fueron publicadas. El enfoque de la traducción de Newmark (1988) y Holmes (1988), junto con la teoría de la traducción feminista, forman el marco teórico. Los resultados de este estudio demuestran la relevancia de las ideas feministas de Woolf y el papel esencial de la traducción en la construcción de una genealogía femenina.

scholarly journals Torn between Cultures: Reading Shashi Tharoor’s Riot

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-66
Author(s):  
Athira M
Keyword(s):  
Indian Society ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Politics And Culture

Shashi Tharoor is a distinctivevoice in the Postcolonial Indian literature in English with his remarkable contribution of more than 16 works of fiction and non-fiction. Postcolonialism refers to a set of theoretical concepts, approaches and interventions which deals with the diverse effects of the interaction between the colonizer and the colonized. History, politics and culture have always been a dominant preoccupation of the Indian English novelists. The compulsive obsession was perhaps inevitable since the genre originated and developed concurrently with the climatic phase of colonial rule. As a diplomat and writer, Shashi Tharoor has explored the diversity of culture in his native country. He has made his point in many of his interviews that the novel is full of collisions of various sorts- personal, political, cultural, emotional and violent. Riot is a novel about the ownership of history, about love, hate, cultural collision, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth. The novel chronicles the mystery of an American 24-year old lady, Priscilla Hart. The intention of this paper is to explore the cultural conflict between the East and the West and an attempt is made to examine Shashi Tharoor’s Riot as a conveyor of the various distinguishable features to the divergent cultures. The characters of Riot are facing problems and striving to achieve their identities as Indians and as individuals in Indian society. Lakshman, though an educated Indian, cannot share his intellectual ideas with any fellow Indians, but feels quite comfortable with Priscilla, an American lady. Yet, he cannot completely forego his Indian identity and is aware of their irreconcilable gap between their culture, values and outlook towards life.  

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