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.

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.

Leonard Woolf

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Early Death ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Unusual Position ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
The Village

This is a wide-ranging biography of Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), an important yet somewhat neglected figure in British life. He is in the unusual position of being overshadowed by his wife, Virginia Woolf, and his role in helping her is part of this study. He was born in London to a father who was a successful barrister but whose early death left the family in economic difficulty. Though he abandoned his Judaism when young, being Jewish was deeply significant in shaping Leonard’s ideas, as well as the Hellenism imbibed as a student at both St Paul’s and Trinity College, Cambridge. Despite his secularism, there were surprisingly spiritual dimensions to his life. At Cambridge he was a member of the secret discussion group, the Apostles, as were his friends Lytton Stracheyand John Maynard Keynes, thus becoming part of the later Bloomsbury Group. He spent seven years as a successful civil servant in Ceylon, which later enabled him to write brilliantly about empire as well as a powerful novel, The Village in the Jungle. Returning to London in 1911, he married Virginia Woolf the next year. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, a successful and significant publishing house. During his long life he became a major figure, a prolific writer on a range of subjects, most importantly international affairs, especially the creation of the League of Nations, a range of domestic problems, and issues of imperialism, particularly in Africa. He was a seminal figure in twentieth-century British life.

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.

scholarly journals The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rebekah Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Future Potential

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity.  But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis.  The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>

Blooming of the Novel in the Bloomsbury Group: An Investigation to the Impact of the Members of Bloomsbury Group on the Composition of the Selected Works of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 323
Author(s):  
SeyedehZahra Nozen ◽  
Bahman Amani ◽  
Fatemeh Ziyarati
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
The Body ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Howards End ◽  
The People ◽  
Single Voice ◽  
Visual Impact ◽  
The Impact

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice…”. Woolf’s belief has been put to the test in the Bloomsbury Group and this paper intends to investigate the validity of her claim through a critical analysis of the selected works of its novelist members. In a central part of London during the first half of the twentieth century a group of intellectual and literary writers, artists, critics and an economist came together which later on was labeled as Bloomsbury group. The group’s members had an influential role in blooming novel in a different form of expression and profoundly affect its literary figures, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, in the composition of their fictions The Waves, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Forster’s A Room with a view and Howards End. The formation of Bloomsbury circle acted as a bridge from the Victorian bigotries and narrow-mindedness to the unbounded era of modernism as they searched for universal peace, individual liberalism and human accomplishments due to ideal social norms. They freely exchanged their views on variety of subjects without any limitation. The reasons behind their popularity compared to several contemporary groups were their innumerable works, the clarification of their lives through their diaries, biographies and autobiographies and their diverse kinds of activities such as criticism, painting, politics and literary writings. They were adherents of truth, goodness, enjoyment of beautiful object, intrinsic values, aesthetics, friendship and personal relationship. Intellectual intimacy and cooperation can be considered as the main attribute of its members as they collaborate with each other and employ the fundamental tenets of the group within their works. The modern style of its artists as post-impressionist highly affects the narration technique of its literary figures. These novelists tried to narrate the verbal utterances in a visual way as if the whole of the story is depicted on a canvas. Furthermore, this paper tries to discover the role of the non-literary (painters and critics) members of the group in blooming and forming of a different and novel kind of narration technique, namely ‘stream of consciousness’, through the visual impact of the painter and the discussion method of critic members of the group.

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.

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