Sinclair, May (1863–1946)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Marriage Problems ◽  
World War I Novels ◽  
May Sinclair

May Sinclair was a novelist, journalist and literary critic. She began writing relatively late in life to help support her family, and while most of her novels would most obviously be categorized as realist, she was a great advocate for the experimentation of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, and is perhaps most influential today as a literary critic of modernism; she was for example the first critic to use the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in relation to literature. Her first commercial success came with her third novel The Divine Fire (1904), a philosophical novel combining a love story with an exploration and critique of the contemporary literary marketplace. Subsequent novels focused largely on social and/or marriage problems, prominent themes in literature of the period. A committed campaigner for women’s rights, her World War I novels (Tasker Jevons: the Real Story of 1916 and The Tree of Heaven of 1917) express her support for the war at a time when the suffrage movement was split between pacifist and pro-combat factions. She wrote two identifiably experimental novels, Mary Olivier (1919) and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), both significantly influenced by her interest in psychoanalysis.

scholarly journals A Literary Voyage into the Unconscious: A Philosophical Approach to the Psychological Novel in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nariman LARBI
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Enterprise ◽  
The World ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Great War

The present paper attempts to reawaken the avant-gardism of the literary Stream of Consciousness; a twentieth-century psychological concept that has been accommodated into fictional exertion through the Interior Monologue. The first practitioners of this technique and mode of narrative reportedness are Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and James Joyce, all of whom are modernist fictional writers who engaged with what previous novelists of the nineteenth century failed to engage with. Woolf observed - in a lecture given to the Cambridge Heretics Society in May 1924 - that: “no generation since the world began has known quite so much about character as our generation”. Woolf’s fiction tends to be psychological, for she experiments with the working of the psyche of her characters and the permanence of the past in the present beyond the reach of realism. Her fiction treats the complex networks of emotions and memories of which the character is the center of the narrative. This paper accordingly, addresses the philosophical background of the Stream of Consciousness and its use within fictional exertion and how the latter is deployed in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to show and uncover the anxieties vis-à-vis her thanatophobia, not only this, but also to express the anxieties of the Great War and the disillusionment towards the modern enterprise.

scholarly journals MODERNISM IN MRS.DALLOWAY

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1609-1613
Author(s):  
Fatbardha Doko ◽  
Hyreme Gurra ◽  
Lirije Ameti
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Life Path ◽  
Style Of Writing

Modernism is a very interesting and important movement in literature, characterized by a very self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction. However, the most important literary genre of modernism is the novel. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. Other European and American Modernist authors whose works rejected chronological and narrative continuity include Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner. After First World War a lot of developments took place, new inventions opened up the mind of artists in the 1920s, one of them was Virginia Woolf, a very specific novelist. So, this paper deals with Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and the main focus is on the elements of modernism in this masterpiece. It is a modern novel which has also most of the features of modernism, or we can say that there are several ways in which one can see Mrs. Dalloway as a Modernist novel. The most dominant characteristic is the content and the narrative style. Virginia Woolf overstepped the traditional writing by describing characters not only superficially but also their inner thoughts. Rather than having a straightforward narrative with a beginning and end and a narrator who knows it all, with Mrs Dalloway we have several narrators, flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness style, and a totally fragmented story. Also there is a connection of the author and her characters; she putted a piece of herself in each one of them. This is how you can find about the author’s life path and how her sufferings, mental illness affected into her writing. Thus, Virginia Woolf is considered an iconic modernist writer and pioneer not only of the stream of consciousness narrative technique, but of the use of free indirect speech, psychological as well as emotional motives of characters. Nevertheless, the unconventional use of figures of speech also makes a great characteristic and a symbol of her novels. Stream of consciousness writing allows readers to “listen in” on a character's thoughts. This will make you explore yourself in ways you have never thought before. Specifically, in Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations to host a party that evening Virginia Woolf records all her thoughts, remembrances and impressions, as well as the thoughts of other characters. There is no actual story, no plots or sub-plots, in fact, there is no action in the traditional sense in this novel, except from the “myriad of impressions” created by Virginia Woolf’s new style of writing.

Athenaeum, The

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimee Gasston
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Solid Objects ◽  
May Sinclair

The Athenaeum, "A Journal of Literature, Science, and the Arts," was published weekly in London between 1828 and 1921. John Middleton Murray was appointed as editor in 1919, recruiting Aldous Huxley as his assistant. The magazine featured cultural, scientific, and political commentary, reviews, literary gossip, as well as original poetry and short stories. Contributors included Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, and members of the Bloomsbury set, such as Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry. Eliot produced essays such as "The Perfect Critic" for the magazine between 1919 and 1920 while working on The Waste Land, quoting writers like Joseph Conrad and James Joyce alongside canonical references. Mansfield was also employed regularly at this time, reviewing the work of contemporaries such as Woolf, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson, as well as collaborating on translations of Chekhov’s letters. The magazine was the first to publish Woolf’s short story "Solid Objects," and to host an early exposition of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Writing Modernist Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Emily Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Edith Wharton ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Dynamic Potential ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
May Sinclair

“Writing Modernist Women: Toward a Poetics of Insubstantiality” traces the development of a “poetics of insubstantiality” across the works of a range of early twentieth-century women writers, including May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Cicely Hamilton, and Edith Wharton, among others. Such a poetics saw a subversive turn towards elements deemed insubstantial, in terms of size and weight, as a means of questioning an established connection of value with the idea of substance. Thus smallness, lightness, and portability are embraced for their dynamic potential in offering an alternative means of engaging with and imagining the world. In demonstrating the dynamic potential of the insubstantial, as conceived by these modernist writers, the chapter builds on recent endeavours, spearheaded by Paul K. Saint-Amour (2018), to conceive of a “weak” modernism, in which “one kind of weakness […] produce[s] another kind of strength.” Likewise, a lack of substance, often even of tangibility, can be found to produce another kind of value in the works I consider here.

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.

Ella Rhoads Higginson

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
New England ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Private School ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Male ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
City Newspaper

Ella Rhoads Higginson (b. 1862?–d. 1940) was born in Council Grove, Kansas, a launching point for westward movement of settler colonialists. When she was a child, her family moved to Oregon, traveling in a wagon train following the old Oregon Trail. The family eventually settled in Oregon City, where she was educated in private school. Ella’s strong interests in reading and writing began early. Her parents possessed a substantial library that included books by Irving, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Ella began writing when she was eight. Her first publication, the poem “Dreams of the Past,” appeared in The Oregon City newspaper when she was fourteen. The following year she began work on The Oregon City Enterprise newspaper, learning typesetting and editorial writing. She also started publishing fiction. In 1885, she married Russell Carden Higginson, a businessman who was a cousin to New England author Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The couple moved north to Whatcom (later Bellingham), Washington, where Higginson lived for fifty-two years until her death. There she devoted herself to writing. She soon became the first influential Pacific Northwest author. People around the world were introduced to the region when they read Higginson’s award-winning writing. Her descriptions of majestic mountains, vast forests, and the scenic waters of the Puget Sound presented the then-remote, unfamiliar Pacific Northwest to eager readers. Her characterizations of white women and men who inhabited the region revealed what life was like in this part of the nation as opposed to regions such as New England. Higginson’s celebrated writings were the first to place the Pacific Northwest on the literary map. Her talent was widely recognized. The prestigious Macmillan Company, which became her publisher, approached her seeking to print her work. She was awarded prizes from magazines such as Collier’s and McClure’s. Her poems were set to music and performed internationally. She published over eight hundred works in her lifetime. However, World War I altered the means of production, resulting in books going out of print and diminishing reputations of well-known authors, especially writers of color and women. Most of Higginson’s books went out of print. After the war, new editors, mostly white men, managed US newspapers, periodicals, and publishing companies. Largely uninterested in prewar authors, they sought writing from nascent literary movements such as Modernism while also promoting works by overlooked white male authors such as Melville. Higginson’s reputation faded in the last decades of her life. By the time she was chosen first Poet Laureate of Washington State in 1931, she and her work were largely remembered only in the Pacific Northwest. When she died in 1940, she was almost completely forgotten. In the 21st century, Higginson and her writings are returning to literary distinction.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document