The Dream Work of a Nation: From Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen to Mary Lavin

2020 ◽  
pp. 387-398
Author(s):  
Patricia Laurence
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Dream Work ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Women’S Writing

Virginia Woolf provides a backbone for important arguments that transform our reading of women’s writing during times of rising nationalism and war. In Three Guineas and elsewhere, she creates a new ground for fiction by including what is commonly thought a ‘small’ rather than a ‘large’ subject, and she creates links between domestic and public ‘tyranny’. Woolf challenges the claims of critics who assert that women writers do not engage with or link their fiction to the wider society, the nation and the world. Inspired by Woolf, the Irish authors, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Lavin, illuminate these ‘small’ shocks and events in the lives of individuals, families, communities and institutions. Bowen provides ‘in-between’ glimpses of war in her wartime stories, Ivy Gripped the Steps while Lavin creates close-ups of ‘small’ scenes of beleaguered widows, loyal wives, enfeebled husbands, independent daughters, and needy clergy in her short stories. The intimate lives revealed in these stories are not ‘outside’ of politics and history and the world but are a part of the historical texture of life. They present a resistance to dominant views and richer definitions of the future of community: the dream work of a nation.

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.

Dialogues between South America and Europe: Victoria Ocampo Channels Virginia Woolf

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Cristina Carluccio
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
South America ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Interpersonal Distance ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Victoria Ocampo ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Women’S Writing

This chapter discusses Virginia Woolf and Victoria Ocampo’s exchanges within a modernist transnational framework shaped by alternative forms of female writing and dissemination. Rather than focusing on any cultural asymmetry between the English writer Woolf and the Argentinian author Ocampo, the analysis highlights the two women’s similar concerns and ideals regarding the female universe, and more specifically women writers. Their shared outlook constituted a powerful empathetic catalyst that allowed them to surpass any cultural and interpersonal distance and thus to satisfy their intellectual hunger. The presence of loans and inheritances – both imaginary and real – in Woolf and Ocampo’s interaction is analysed partly in the light of the global novel and located on a borderless spectrum of women’s writing. More specifically, Ocampo’s inter-textual dialogues with Woolf – such as those in her ‘Carta a Virginia Woolf’ (1934), which includes references to A Room of One’s Own (1929) – are read as a typically female form of dissemination, partly aimed at interrupting an otherwise male monologue. The two women’s face-to-face encounters – and recollections of them – are also pondered. Special attention is paid to their first meeting, when Woolf and Ocampo sealed a female intellectual pact against fascism as an overt manifestation of male tyranny.

Virginia Woolf and the World of Books

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Independent Publishing ◽  
The World ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Women’S Writing

Virginia Woolf and the World of Books examines Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press as a key intervention in modernist and women's writing and mark its importance to independent publishing, bookselling, and print culture at large. The research in this volume coincides with the centenary of the founding of Hogarth Press in 1917, thus making a timely addition to scholarship on the Woolfs and print culture.

scholarly journals Women’s Writing of The First World War

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1 (3)) ◽  
pp. 130-140
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Kedzierska
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Common ◽  
First World ◽  
Women’S Writing

The article aims to withdraw the works of women writers from years of oblivion and neglect. These are the writers who depicted the dire consequence of war and its impact on women. The article draws parallels between the dedication, commitment of female factory workers, their readiness to sacrifice their own health for the common sacred cause and the heroic deeds of the soldiers fighting in the battlefield. The article also includes a number of works by women writers together with their interpretations which come to confirm the creative skills of the latter.

‘The Enjoyment of Literature’: Women Writers and the ‘Battle of the Brows’

Time and Tide ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 177-208
Author(s):  
Catherine Clay
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Status ◽  
Women’S Writing

This chapter picks up and extends arguments advanced earlier in the book regarding the status of women’s writing and criticism during the years of modernism’s cultural ascendancy and academic institutionalisation. In the contexts of (1) a newly configured ‘University English’ which took an authoritative new role in the cultural field against an earlier belle-lettres tradition, and (2) the unprecedented prestige of middlebrow fiction in the 1930s, the chapter explores how Time and Tide navigated increasing tensions between ‘highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ spheres and succeeded in straddling both. First the chapter discusses the introduction in 1927 of a new ‘Miscellany’ section of the paper – home to E. M. Delafield’s popular serial ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’ – and argues that these columns created and legitimised a place for the ‘feminine middlebrow’ and amateur writer as the periodical increased its orientation towards the highbrow sphere. Second, with reference to the appointment of Time and Tide’s first two literary editors, the chapter discusses how the periodical negotiated a widening gap in this period between intellectual and general readers, and between amateur and professional modes of criticism.

John Lehmann’s War Effort: The Penguin New Writing (1940–1950)

2020 ◽  
pp. 250-272
Author(s):  
Tessa Thorniley
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Literary Periodicals ◽  
The World ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Rosamond Lehmann

John Lehmann’s The Penguin New Writing (1940-1950) is considered one of the finest literary periodicals of World War Two. The journal was committed to publishing writing about all aspects of wartime life, from the front lines to daily civilian struggles, by writers from around the world. It had an engaged readership and a high circulation. This chapter specifically considers Lehmann’s contribution to the wartime heyday for the short story form, through the example of The Penguin New Writing. By examining Lehmann’s editorial approach this chapter reveals the ways he actively engaged with his contributors, teasing and coaxing short stories out of them and contrasts this with the editorial style of Cyril Connolly at rival Horizon magazine. Stories by, and Lehmann’s interactions with, established writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green and Rosamond Lehmann, the emerging writer William Sansom and working-class writers B.L Coombs and Jim Phelan, are the main focus of this chapter. The international outlook of the journal, which promoted satire from China alongside short, mocking works by Graham Greene, is also evaluated as an often overlooked aspect of Lehmann’s venture. Through the short stories and Lehmann’s editorials, this chapter traces how Lehmann sought to shape literature and to elevate the short story form. The chapter concludes by considering how the decline of the short story form in Britain from the 1950s onwards was closely linked to the demise of the magazines which had most actively supported it.

Modernist Alternatives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the dark themes and moods that characterize some of Ray Bradbury's short stories, a reflection of his deep ambivalence toward an increasingly destabilized world. Bradbury never developed a postmodernist dislike of where technology and science had brought the world, but he always remained wary of where science may lead mankind in the future. This predictive urge led him to use his science fiction stories to work through some of the issues left unresolved in his failed novels. This chapter discusses “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and several of Bradbury's tales, written in the 1946–1948 period, which are distinguished from other Bradbury stories of the period by their science fiction trappings, their unrelieved darkness, the lack of any familiar points of reference, and their relative obscurity within the Bradbury canon. It also considers the relationship stories that eased Bradbury through his impasse with Modernist themes.

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