The Politics of Form: The Golden Notebook and Women’s Radical Literary Tradition

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Politics Of Form ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Muriel Rukeyser

In A Proper Marriage (1954), Martha Quest wants to ‘break the nightmare of repetition’ that has shaped the twentieth century — the seemly unending cycle of patriarchy, nationalism, war, colonialism, and rigid political ideologies. In The Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing enacts this disruption through an experimental crossing of genres, documenting, as if fulfilling Virginia Woolf’s wish in Professions for Women (1931), the ‘sexual lives of women’ in the context of collective histories. Through her combination of fiction, documentary material, political theory, and memoir, Lessing offers a nuanced reading of the connections between state violence, sexual hierarchies, and political crises. Using textual hybridity to resist closed formal and political structures that reinscribe authority, Lessing writes women as central narrators and subjects of twentieth-century politics and history, subverting the boundaries of gender and genre. However, Lessing’s radical textual and political project is not a singular one. This chapter considers new ways of reading Lessing’s text alongside works by Virginia Woolf, Muriel Rukeyser, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Arundhati Roy, and Claudia Rankine, arguing that the The Golden Notebook is not only better understood within these networks, but is pivotal for understanding the formal and political possibilities of hybridity in the hands of women writers.

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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Virginia Woolf: Between writing and disease

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Ballester-Roca ◽  
Noelia Ibarra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Literary Legacy

The authors offer an analysis of mental illness in the work of a key twentieth century author: Virginia Woolf. A critical review of her literary legacy allows us to get closer to what might be one of the most intense literary portrayals of illness and its metaphors and, at the same time, to the representations, euphemisms, silences, and monsters depicted in the chapters of her life and in the unique voice of an essential author.

scholarly journals Az igazságügyi gyermekvédelem fejlődése Finkeytől napjainkig

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-124
Author(s):  
Barbara Katalin Herke-Fábos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Juvenile Offenders ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Young Offenders ◽  
Financial Vulnerability ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Procedural Law

Child protection in justice is designed to prevent crime among children and juveniles, to keep them away from further crime, and to reintegrate young offenders into society. So, it also covers the areas of prevention, enforcement, and aftercare. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, it was recognized that child protection covers the elimination of a child’s financial vulnerability, the prevention of moral misconduct, and the representation of the interests of both orphans and the unhealthy. The country’s opportunities have been influenced not only by political ideologies but also by the human and material casualties suffered as a result of the two world wars. The current focus of child protection in justice is always on socio-economic and political problems. Examining the personality and family relationships of juvenile offenders also went a long way in the designated period. The protection of children in justice also affects the areas of administrative law, criminal substantive and procedural law, and criminology. At the end of the paper, I compare the institution of patronage and the preventive patronage.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 222-234
Author(s):  
Stuart Aveyard ◽  
Paul Corthorn ◽  
Sean O’Connell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Consumer Credit ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
European Consumer ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The long-term perspective taken by The Politics of Consumer Credit in the UK affords fresh evidence on a number of significant historical debates. It indicates that Britain’s departure from pathways followed in other European consumer credit markets was not simply a by-product of neo-liberalism’s influence on late-twentieth-century governments. It has also allowed us to offer important contributions on questions such as the impact of political ideologies over policymaking, the validity of a right–left framework for analysing politics, the extent to which a post-war consensus existed (and was broken after 1979), and the question of how adept British political parties were in exploiting the emergence of a more affluent electorate....

The Ecology of English Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-178
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
World War ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Second World

At a time when the English landscape was mobilized—both materially and in the cultural imagination—for fighting the Second World War, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fashioned their most ‘English’ works, Between the Acts (1941) and Four Quartets (1935–42) respectively. Building on extant scholarship surrounding the writers’ temporal and environmental concerns, Chapter 6 provides an alternative account of the writers’ supposed national insularity as one inflected by pacifist and internationalist motivations. Tracing the study of ecology as it was historically intertwined with cosmopolitical inquiry in the twentieth century, the chapter reveals ways in which the writers’ late modernist works uphold Anglocentric exceptionalism but, also, provide diversified understandings of time and place to convey international belonging.

‘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.

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.

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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