The Reception of Virginia Woolf and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Australia

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-78
Author(s):  
Suzanne Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Student Thesis ◽  
Australian Universities ◽  
Ebb And Flow

This chapter surveys Woolf’s reputation in Australia from the 1920s to the 1970s as it was moulded by colonial cultural politics. The competing influences of cosmopolitanism and nationalism shaped the ebb and flow of Woolf’s reception in Australia during these decades. The rise of the more nationalist Leavisite curriculum in Australian universities from the later 1930s, coupled with ambivalent responses to Woolf’s death in 1941, led to more a more divisive reception of Woolf and modernism in Australia in the mid-century. Australian literary critics Nettie Palmer and Margaret (Margot) Hentze espoused a cosmopolitanism that they found reflected in Woolf’s work, a focus also embraced by Nuri Mass, who, in 1942, submitted the first student thesis on Woolf at University of Sydney. Finally, the chapter examines how three women Australian painters, including Grace Cossington Smith, were influenced by Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.

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.

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.

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.

Modernist Physics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Albert Einstein ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Crowd Psychology

Modernist Physics takes as its focus the ideas associated with three scientific papers published by Albert Einstein in 1905, considering the dissemination of those ideas both within and beyond the scientific field, and exploring the manifestation of similar ideas in the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, Modernist Physics seeks both to combine and to distinguish between the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on the ideas associated with one of Einstein’s papers. Part I considers Woolf in relation to Einstein’s paper on light quanta, arguing that questions of duality and complementarity had a wider cultural significance in the early twentieth century than has yet been acknowledged, and suggesting that Woolf can usefully be considered a complementary, rather than a dualistic, writer. Part II looks at Lawrence’s reading of at least one book on relativity in 1921, and his subsequent suggestion in Fantasia of the Unconscious that ‘we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity’—a theory which is shown to be relevant to Lawrence’s writing of relationships both before and after 1921. Part III considers Woolf and Lawrence together alongside late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of molecular physics and crowd psychology, suggesting that Einstein’s work on Brownian motion provides a useful model for thinking about individual literary characters.

Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and British Modernism

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Davison-Pégon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Strategic Marketing ◽  
British Modernism ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Mediator

This article examines S. S. Koteliansky as cultural mediator involved not only in the translation of Russian classics, but in strategic marketing ploys and post-revolutionary activism, shaping the cultural attitudes of early twentieth-century London. It starts from his networks in Whitehall, Westminster, and Bloomsbury, before appraising the tactics of enjoining writers to translate and publish the texts he was bringing to Britain. It then turns to the poetics of co-authored translations. Brief extracts from ‘Stavrogin's Confession’, the suppressed chapters of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, translated in 1922 in collaboration with Virginia Woolf, reveal a distinctly modernist attention to voice.

Hogarth Press

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Battershill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Publishing Company ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Press ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Fully Functioning

The Hogarth Press was a publishing company run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. A small independent publisher, the Press produced works by modernist thinkers and writers including Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf herself. The Press originated in the Woolfs’ drawing room at Hogarth House in Richmond, London. In 1922 the Press moved to the Bloomsbury area of London, a geographical hub for modernist publishing and the home of their social and intellectual circle, the Bloomsbury Group. Despite its domestic origins, the Hogarth Press quickly became a fully functioning publisher and an influential force in the early twentieth-century literary world. The Press published over five hundred titles between 1917 and 1946, when the firm was sold to Chatto & Windus. These books and pamphlets ranged across a wide variety of topics and approaches: everything from best-sellers to privately printed personal memorial books for family and friends came under the publisher’s imprint, with its widely recognizable ‘Woolf’s head’ logo.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Fiona Cox ◽  
Elena Theodorakopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
Claude Cahun

The first half of this introduction provides some context for the variety of women’s responses to the Homeric epics discussed in the volume by tracing the origins of these responses back to earlier authors including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and Claude Cahun. It also discusses the paucity of critical attention paid to women’s receptions of Homer, and demonstrates how much is to be gained by rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey through the work of women writers since the early twentieth century. The second half offers an overview of the approaches and figures selected for discussion, women as diverse as Simone Weil and Kate Tempest, as Francisca Aguirre and Barbara Köhler, working in a variety of genres and radically altering the landscape of classical reception.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madelyn Detloff ◽  
Brenda Helt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Art Critics

This introduction explains how and why the essays of Queer Bloomsbury combine the Bloomsbury Group’s personal lives with aspects routinely elevated to a higher status – art, politics, philosophy – understanding these as inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon. Contributors to this volume neither shrink from nor capitalise on sexual details, but are primarily interested in how group members’ queer perspectives enabled their thinking and its results. Sexual intimacy between friends of either gender was not only accepted, but understood as a rich source of intellectual, artistic, and philosophical affinity. Contemporary philosophical and political theory has returned to the insights cultivated by the Bloomsbury Group, if that return is characterised as a holistic way of living sexually, intellectually, artistically, ethically, and intimately, rather than in parts. Considering Bloomsbury as an interdisciplinary field – inhabited by artists, authors, philosophers, economists, political activists, art critics, journalists, and biographers – enriches our understanding of early twentieth-century cultures.

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