Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, and: The Victorian Heritage of Virginia Woolf: The External World in her Novels (review)

1987 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 718-721
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Schwarz
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
External World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Group I ◽  
History Of

Materialities of Abstraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Brandon Truett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Material World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

Addison and the Victorians

2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
History Of

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

Preface to a Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group

1981 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 329
Author(s):  
S. P. Rosenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
History Of

Genre Maketh Dog?

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 277-298
Author(s):  
Mirjam Haas ◽  
Leonie Kirchhoff
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Objective Observer ◽  
History Of

In The New Biography, Virginia Woolf notes that there is a paradox inherent to the genre of biography, i. e. that of »truth« and »personality«. »[P]ersonality«, she argues further, can only be truly conveyed through aesthetic selection and manipulation of the facts of a life, through fiction. Animal biography challenges both of these categories: what is a true dog character and how close can an author come to a life-like depiction of it? Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) as well as the earliest English example of animal biography, Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little or The Life and Adventures of a Lap Dog (1751), are, in their own way, concerned with this issue. Influenced by their generic predecessors, the texts explore the narratological possibilities which an animal biography can offer, from satirical purposes to aesthetic objectives, from mere functionalisation to sentient animals. Woolf is essentially affected by contemporary discussions of biography and the challenges imposed by creating a dog »personality«. This is fundamental for the depiction of Flush as having an individual (anthropomorphised) character, rather than being depicted as a mere, and changeable type. Pompey the Little, in contrast, serves as a mostly silent and apparently objective observer of society, who, by watching and imitating his masters’ manners, offers eighteenth-century society a ruthlessly unembellished look into the mirror. Consequently, his animal character is, for satirical purposes, reduced to a mere type rather than a complex, not to mention »truth[ful]«, depiction of a nonhuman character. In this paper, we argue that genre expectations interact with two further aspects, i.e. literary history and historical as well as philosophical developments, and all three decisively influence how the two texts understand and relate human as well as non-human experience.

Reading the Times

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times ◽  
Twentieth Century Fiction

From the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf to the novels of William Gibson and W.G. Sebald, Reading the Times offers fresh insight into modern narrative. It shows how profoundly the structure and themes of the novel depend on attitudes to the clock and to the sense of history’s progress, tracing their origins in technologic, economic and social change. It offers a new and powerful way of understanding the relations of history with narrative form, outlining their development and demonstrating – through incisive analyses of a very wide range of texts from late C19th to early C21st – their key role in shaping fictional narrative throughout this period. The result is a highly innovative literary history of the twentieth-century fiction, based on an inventive, enabling method of understanding literature in relation to history – in terms, in every sense, of its reading of its times.

Virginia Woolf and Poetry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Book History ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Genetic Criticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Prose

Virginia Woolf’s career was shaped by her impression of the conflict between poetry and the novel, a conflict she often figured as one between masculine and feminine, old and new, bound and free. In large part for feminist reasons, Woolf promoted the triumph of the novel over poetry, even as she adapted some of poetry’s techniques for the novel in order to portray the inner life. Woolf considered poetry the rival form to the novel. A monograph on Woolf’s sense of generic rivalry thus offers a thorough reinterpretation of the motivations and aims of her canonical work. Drawing on unpublished archival material and little-known publications, the book combines biography, book history, formal analysis, genetic criticism, source study, and feminist literary history. Woolf’s attitude toward poetry is framed within contexts of wide scholarly interest: the decline of the lyric poem, the rise of the novel, the gendered associations with these two genres, elegy in prose and verse, and the history of English Studies. Written in clear and lively language, the book maintains a narrative drive as it traces Woolf’s reading and writing over her lifetime, including her response to poets and critics in her circle such as J. K. Stephen, Julian Bell, Vita Sackville-West, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. Virginia Woolf and Poetry makes three important contributions. It clarifies a major prompt for Woolf’s poetic prose. It exposes the generic rivalry that was creatively generative to many modernist writers. And it details how holding an ideology of a genre can shape literary debates and aesthetics.

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