Virginia Woolf’s Reception and Impact on Brazilian Women’s Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 246-266
Author(s):  
Maria A. de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Clarice Lispector ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Transnational Modernism ◽  
Lucia Miguel Pereira ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Lygia Fagundes Telles

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.

Thinking Back through Virginia Woolf: Woolf as Portal in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine W. Hollis
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Waves

“I am not Virginia Woolf,” a character exclaims in Lidia Yuknavitch’s award-winning novel The Small Backs of Children (2015). But who among us is? If we are women writers, particularly experimental women writers, Virginia Woolf’s legacy is profound and ongoing. Thus Yuknavitch’s main character, a woman writer troubled with a traumatic past, expresses her debt to Woolf with a bit of brash ambivalence: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. What a crock. Virginia, fuck you, old girl, old dead girl” (7). That these are the first words this character speaks in Small Backs belies her debt to Woolf’s influence. Indeed, Lidia Yuknavitch – a contemporary American writer and academic – has elsewhere spoken of Woolf as the “portal” through which Yuknavitch approaches her own writing. In this paper, I want to demonstrate the multiple and compelling ways in which Yukavitch’s most recent novel is indebted to the legacy of Virginia Woolf. The Small Backs of Children is an experimental, sometimes challenging novel that defies generic conventions. As in Woolf’s Three Guineas, The Small Backs of Children takes as its subject the impact of war and violence on the bodies of women and girls. As in Woolf’s The Waves, each character takes turns recounting their part of the narrative, while their multiple voices together create a collective consciousness greater than any single perspective. Further, as in Woolf’s theory of biography, Yuknavitch mixes the “granite and rainbow” of fact and fiction to craft a story that is a groundbreaking mixture of the two. Indeed, in the example of The Small Backs of Children, we see a compelling example of a 21st century woman writer thinking back through Virginia Woolf.

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

2021 ◽  
pp. 572-589
Author(s):  
Tonya Krouse
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Fatima Mernissi ◽  
Zadie Smith ◽  
Female Characterization

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.

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 Óscar Wilde y Reinaldo Arenas. Enigmas de pasión

2012 ◽  
pp. 234-269
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Quesada Monge
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Reinaldo Arenas ◽  
Clarice Lispector

Este no es en realidad un ensayo sobre literatura comparada. Utilizando como excusa el arte del escritor irlandés Oscar Wilde y el del cubano Reinaldo Arenas, intentamos proponer algunas ideas y análisis sobre la libertad y el impacto que han tenido sus creaciones sobre el medio social. El artículo aspira a demostrar cómo los esquemas sociales, políticos e ideológicos están estrechamente relacionados con nuestra noción de libertad en la sociedad contemporánea. La Poesía y la Libertad, la Poesía y la Existencia son algunos de los temas abordados en un trabajo que ya es parte de un texto mayor, en el cual se intenta también establecer posibles relaciones entre la escritora brasileña Clarice Lispector y la inglesa Virginia Woolf.

scholarly journals TRANSESCRITAS DA EDUCAÇÃO: WOOLF E LISPECTOR

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ademilson Filocreão Veiga ◽  
Gilcilene Dias Da Costa
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Clarice Lispector

O presente artigo enseja, por meio das obras de Virgínia Woolf e Clarice Lispector, pensar as potências de uma transescrita da educação. O movimento consiste em colocar a literatura sob o domínio dos afectos e perceptos, criar uma intercessão com a filosofia da diferença e a educação, com os personagens de Lispector e Woolf, aproximando e tensionando sentidos ao contingencial e ao essencial da realidade educacional e literária. Partindo desse ponto, esse estudo busca questionar o que é banalizado como realidade única em educação e literatura, por meio de obras das próprias autoras, que realizam deslocamentos de linguagem e experimentações. Para tanto, alguns autores intercedem nesse percurso, como Deleuze e Guattari (1977), Nascimento (2012), Zordan e Tadeu (2004), Prado (2017). Propomos instigações e experimentações no âmbito educacional, por meio de intercessões e aproximações entre Lispector e Woolf ao encontro de uma transescrita como estilo ou Diferença, uma escrita livre e de livre trânsito entre as autoras e personagens, com suas linguagens que colidem umas com as outras, em movimentos confluentes de potências de vida na educação.

Introduction

Ladies' Greek ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yopie Prins
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Collective Identification ◽  
Victorian Women ◽  
Greek Alphabet ◽  
Women Of Letters

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.

An Office of Her Own? Alice Munro and the Legacy of Writing with In-Authority

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Mendez
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Alice Munro ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Women’S Writing

In Alice Munro’s short story “The Office,” the protagonist claims an office of her own in which to write. Munro’s narrative can thus be read as engaging with the ideas on the spatial conditions for women’s writing which Virginia Woolf famously explored in A Room of One’s Own. My paper takes this thematic connection as a point of departure for suggesting that a Woolfian legacy shapes Munro’s “The Office” in ways which go beyond a shared interest in spaces for women’s writing. Both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” this paper argues, use the discussion of women’s writing spaces as a launching pad for exploring in how far women writers may claim for themselves traditionally masculine positions of authorship and authority, and in what ways authoritative forms of literary discourse may be transformed by women’s writing. In both A Room of One’s Own and “The Office,” the interruption as element of plot and rhetorical strategy plays a central role in answering these questions.

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