Theorists of the Modernist Novel: James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf (review)

2011 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-471
Author(s):  
Eric Bulson
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Modernist Novel

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

8. Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Journal Entries

Few of the great modernist writers produced explicit or fully fledged autobiographies, but the expansion of the ‘life-writing’ category has made visible the prevalence of autobiographical novels, including works by Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. ‘Autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and autofictions’ explains that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an increasingly ‘aesthetic’ approach to autobiography. New genres arose that blended life-writing and fiction, such as the personal essay, the ‘imaginary portrait’, and novels which incorporated authentic letters and journal entries. Since the 1980s, it is argued, the novel has been eclipsed by autobiographical narrative, reversing the earlier sense that autobiographical writing was of secondary importance.

Towards a Definition of the ‘long modernist novel’

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-298
Author(s):  
Michael Bell
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Women In Love

This paper considers a number of long fictions from the modernist period to see how far their length serves specifically modernist concerns, especially temporality and history. Various extended narratives suit modernist aesthetic mythopoeia for which Nietzsche's essay on The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life provides a philosophical articulation. Joyce's Ulysses, Proust's A la recherche, and Mann's Joseph and his Brothers (along with Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love) are the principal works compared and contrasted. But there are authors who stand apart from these encompassing, if not to say masterful, mythopoeic visions. Musil's unfinished Man without Qualities resists the modes of resolution which in several of the former instances have a strongly masculinist inflection. So too, to a significant extent, does Lawrence with his strongly feminine sensibility. Above all, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, while engaging with similar concerns, constitute a critical outside to the mythopoeic grouping.

Modernist Soundscapes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Frattarola
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Sound Perception ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment

Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Interior Monologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Herman
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Direct Discourse ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Alfred Döblin ◽  
Italo Svevo ◽  
The Right

One of the hallmarks of modernist style, interior monologue affords a prime opportunity for studying how writers ranging from James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson to Italo Svevo and Alfred Döblin innovated on conventions for speech and thought presentation to create effects of psychological immediacy. Gerald Prince, building on Dorrit Cohn’s foundational account of techniques for presenting fictional minds, defines interior monologue as "the nonmediated presentation of a character’s thoughts and impressions or perceptions" (2003: 45). In this usage, interior monologue is a cover term that applies to more or less extended passages of free direct discourse—in other words, discourse that, though stripped of quotation marks and tag phrases such as she reflected or he wondered, can be assumed to correspond to or quote the unvocalized thoughts of a character. The "Penelope" episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses is often taken to be a prototypical instance of the form, though Joyce deploys interior monologue in less extended stretches throughout his novel, nowhere more movingly than at the end of the "Lestrygonians" episode. Here the text cross-cuts between reports of Leopold Bloom’s outward conduct as he attempts to avoid Blazes Boylan and passages that can be taken as offering an unfiltered presentation of Bloom’s perceptions and thoughts when he encounters his wife’s lover (italics mark instances of interior monologue): His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right. Is it? Almost certain. Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on. (Joyce 1986: 150)

Twentieth-Century Pathological Writers and Their Creativity

2019 ◽  
pp. 277-295
Author(s):  
Suzette Henke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Cultural Factors ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Psychiatric History ◽  
Traumatic Loss ◽  
Experimental Fiction ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
History Of

Culturally constructed pathologies exhibited by three authors of the modernist period: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, reveal an emotional trajectory from paralyzing depressive or obsessive behavior to explosions of creative genius channeled into experimental fiction. Each of these authors struggled with a personal history of psychological distress evinced by genetic, experiential, or cultural factors and exacerbated by traumatic events in childhood or adolescence. All three sought to handle posttraumatic stress through complex gestures of aesthetic reenactment in a process that might be described as scriptotherapy. Woolf epitomizes the tortured artist grappling with so-called madness. Throughout her canon, she self-consciously struggles with irreconcilable issues of gender, abjection, and mourning. What appears to have been bipolar disorder in Woolf’s own psychiatric history might well have engendered a lifetime of creativity punctuated by severe bouts of debilitating depression. Joyce struggled with a pathological fear of erotic betrayal that spurred an obsessional fascination with adultery and with the enigma of spousal complicity, a drama whose erotic perversities were later played out in his twentieth-century epic novel, Ulysses. D. H. Lawrence proved somewhat notorious for his pathological obsessions with sexual desire, homosocial bonding, erotic loss, and conjugal betrayal. These authors worked through pathological symptoms to convert the seeds of incipient madness into burgeoning works of literary genius. They incorporated the pain of traumatic loss into the triumph of aesthetic integration via the creation of radically innovative and experimental art.

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