Virginia Woolf in the Canon of Women’s Literature Narrative Futures of The Feminist Novel

Author(s):  
Tonya Krouse

Virginia Woolf’s novels have historically been regarded as exceptional for their nuanced characterization, particularly of women, and as foundationally influential to women writers after 1945. This chapter investigates the feminist underpinnings of Woolf’s portrayals of female characters in order to trace Woolf’s ongoing legacy in the feminist writing of today’s women authors. Focusing on three archetypes—the Angel, the Artist, and the Girl—the chapter evaluates Woolf’s techniques for female characterization alongside those deployed by women writers including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Claire Messud, Fatima Mernissi, and Jenni Fagan. These comparative readings show the ways in which Woolf’s fiction inspires contemporary women writers to explore relationships between women and gives them a map for creating complex narratives of affiliation to encompass women’s physical, emotional, and intellectual lives.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Etman

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project presents a way to view Shakespeare’s plays through a different lens. These books allow for a feminist reading of Shakespeare, looking at some of Shakespeare’s ill-treated female characters to construct a new idea of female characterization. Three of the plays adapted, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew, were adapted by female authors. By investigating how these plays are being adapted for a more contemporary audience, with modern conceptions of feminism and gender roles, we can gain insight as to how these concepts have changed since Shakespeare’s time. By looking at these modern adaptations, we can interrogate how modern audiences as a whole conceptualize and, potentially, idealize Shakespeare, as well as understanding the progression of treatment of women in contemporary culture since Shakespeare’s time. The novels addressed in this project are The Gap of Time by Jeannette Winterson, Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, and Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler. The project concludes that, of the three, Vinegar Girl does the most effective job addressing the problematic aspects of its adapted play in a new way, distinguishing it from previous adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. This project also investigates the role that adaptation theory plays in addressing Shakespeare adaptations, particularly the Hogarth Shakespeare Project.


2020 ◽  
pp. 246-266
Author(s):  
Maria A. de Oliveira

This chapter discusses Woolf’s reception in Brazil as revealed through the work of Brazilian women writers. As a theoretical framework, the chapter relies on a transnational approach including Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism; Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s ‘Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourse’, Gayatri C. Spivak’s article ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ and Pelogia Goulimari’s Women Writing Across Cultures. The chapter traces the waves of feminism in Brazil over the decades, examines Woolf’s surge of popularity in Brazil following the publication of Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon (1999), and analyses Woolf’s impact on multiple Brazilian women writers: Tetrá de Teffé (1897–1995), Lucia Miguel Pereira (1901–59), Clarice Lispector (1920–77), Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914–77), Ana Cristina Cesar (1952–83), Lygia Fagundes Telles (1923–), Hilda Hilst (1930–2004), Sônia Coutinho (1939–), Adriana Lunardi (1964–), Luiza Lobo (1948–) and Hilda Gouveia de Oliveira (1946–). By the twenty-first century, Woolf’s work has become truly global. Woolf died more than sixty years ago, but her texts are still alive, and she is still moving and inspiring other women writers, to the point that we can talk about a multiplicity of Woolfs.


1970 ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Salwa Ghaly

Surveying women's literature over the past two centuries, gynocriticism I has found, perhaps to our surprise, that one of the recurrent themes in the writings of both Third World and Western women has been madness. Time and again , women authors from different periods and literary traditions, with diverse cultural,ideological and epistemic affiliations and commitments, bring out this theme to demonstrate emphatically and unequivocally how the symptoms of psychologicaldisfunctionality, together with definitions of madness, are culture-produced and bound, the products of a virulently hierarchical and patriarchal symbolic order.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 81-85
Author(s):  
Linshuo Qi

Before the Victorian era, it was rare for women to be authors and writers to fix the protagonists of their works as female characters. However, in the 19th century, there was a rapid increase of women writers and emphasis on feminist consciousness. Among all the works of women writers, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights which were written by the Bronte sisters were distinctive. The Bronte sisters conveyed their feminist consciousness and described the society in their works. Both works emphasized romantic relationships as the narrative thread. By shaping the female characters in their works as self-reliant women who fought for equivalence and freedom in the era where male chauvinism occupied leadership roles, the Bronte sisters conveyed their eagerness for freedom, equality, and their feminist consciousness. This paper combines features of the Victorian era and the Bronte sisters’ life experiences to analyze feminist consciousness in these two works and make comparisons between them.


Author(s):  
Yopie Prins

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.


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