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.

scholarly journals "The blindfold test"

1970 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
Sabina Versieck
Keyword(s):  
Gender Difference ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Women’S Writing ◽  
The Way

Is there a recognisable gender difference in the way men and women write?Is it possible to tell an author's gender from his or her prose? Or as E.M.Forster puts it: when you are reading a book can you teil instinctively whetherit is the work of a man or a woman? Virginia Woolf is concerned with thesequestions in (a.o.) A Room of One's Own; E.M. Forster writes about them inThe Feminine Note in Literature. Both Woolf's views and those of E.M.Forster on the difference between men's writing and women's writing and onsexual difference in general are examined and compared and put in a broadercontext.

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.

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.

scholarly journals From a double margin: Anglophone translation of women's writing from Croatia and Serbia

Reci, Beograd ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Sibelan Forrester
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article examines Anglophone translations of women's writing from Eastern Europe with particular focus on writers from Croatia and Serbia. After outlining the presences and absences of these women writers in Anglophone translations, it raises some questions about the significance of gender in literary canon formation and the emergence of literary works into a global context through translation.

scholarly journals From Feminization of Fiction to Feminine Metafiction in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Woolf’s Orlando

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wassila Hamza Reguig-Mouro
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
Feminist Literary Criticism ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Women’S Writing

Feminism developed and widened its scope to different disciplines such as literature, history, and sociology. It is associated with various other schools and theories like Marxism and poststructuralism, as well. In the field of literature, feminist literary criticism managed to throw away the dust that cumulated on women’s writing and succeeded in raising interest in those forgotten female artists. Some critics in the field of feminism claim that there are no separate spheres, masculine and feminine, whereas others have opted for post-feminist thinking. Some women writers used metafiction to write literary criticism. Therefore, how do Gaskell and Woolf implement metafiction in their stories? Accordingly, this work aims at shedding light on Wives and Daughters by Gaskell and Orlando by Woolf to tackle metafiction from a feminist perspective. Examples from both novels about intertextuality, narration, and other aspects, that are part of metafiction, will be provided to illustrate how and where metafiction is used.

Reviewing Women: Women Reviewers on Women Novelists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Peiser
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Issues ◽  
Anna Barbauld ◽  
Women’S Writing

What is the place of women writers in literary history, and the history of women’s print media? Megan Peiser’s chapter answers these questions through the specific lens of Romantic women reviewers’ assessments of work by Romantic women novelists. The chapter begins by accounting for the difficulties of its approach. Since periodical voices are often collaborative, anonymous/pseudonymous and published serially they require readers to chase their commitment to these publications through multiple issues rather than declaring completeness and authority through a single accessible printing. The chapter proceeds with detailed accounts of the reviewing careers of Elizabeth Moody and Anna Barbauld and how they used their contingent presence as writers for the Monthly Review (1749–1844) to bolster the works of women writers of the period in a medium that has traditionally been perceived to be hostile to women’s writing.

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