How Should One Read “The Reader”?

In the final months of her life, Virginia Woolf worked on two projects. One was the posthumously published novel Between the Acts (1941). The other was a literary-historical project, which she provisionally titled “Turning the Page” or “Reading at Random”, but which is now known by the dual titles “Anon” and “The Reader”. Although published in a 1979 eclectic edition, these documents have received little critical attention. This article proposes three novel approaches to this archive of documents. The first takes up the methodology proposed by Woolf’s original titles and reads a single folio of this project at random, paying close material attention to what is on both sides of Woolf’s typescript page. The second approach expands on the materialist slant of the first approach and offers an anatomy of this archive, while the third approach expands on my previous discussion of cataloging and classification, in order to sketch out a historiography of Woolf’s late archive.

Intimate Partner Femicide in Romania: An Analysis of the Online Media News

The study presents the results of the analysis of the way in which the Romanian online media covered the cases of intimate partner femicide committed between 2011-2015. The term intimate partner femicide was used to designate all the homicide committed intentionally by a current or former intimate partner against the woman partner (wife, girlfriend, concubine). The information regarding the intimate partener femicide was identified with the help of Google Chrome search engine and some key words. In the end, I identified N=2282 articles where 184 femicide cases committed between intimate partners. The analysis of the information regarding the intimate partner femicide cases was made with the help of a grid analysis structured on four dimensions: data regarding the violence act, data regarding the aggressor and victim, and data regarding the history of the relationship. The study highlights the journalists’ lack of interest in describing the context in which femicides occurred and the lack of correlation between the acts of domestic violence and intimate partner femicides. Moreover, few journalists include information regarding the way of contacting the institutions of victim protection and thus they do not use an important occasion to contribute to the readers’ information about the way in which they can interfere and help a victim.

«Amnesia in Fancy Dress»: il pageant in Between The Acts di Virginia Woolf e in Wigs on the Green di Nancy Mitford

Il saggio si pone come obiettivo l’analisi della rievocazione storica, il pageant, e del suo significato all’interno di due romanzi inglesi dell’interwar period: Between the Acts (1941) di Virginia Woolf e Wigs on the Green (1935) di Nancy Mitford. Il pageant ha rivestito un ruolo di primo piano nell’Inghilterra degli anni compresi fra le due guerre, assurgendo a simbolo della tradizione inglese e della Englishness,e trovando, inoltre, un forte riscontro nella letteratura di quel periodo. In Between the Acts, la rievocazione storica messa in scena da Miss La Trobe nel cuore della campagna inglese, sul prato di Pointz Hall, è il riflesso del caos ineluttabile che contraddistingue la condizione umana nel mondo moderno e del profondo senso di solitudine e di isolamento della società inglese sull’orlo della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Mitford utilizza invece il pageant come strumento per smascherare l’inconsistente ideologia nazionalista del fascismo inglese di quegli anni, considerata dalla scrittrice solo vuota retorica priva di uno scopo concreto, e rappresentata, in Wigs on the Green, dal personaggio di Eugenia Malmains, la più ricca ereditiera inglese – versione romanzesca della sorella della scrittrice, la fascista Unity Valkyrie – fervente sostenitrice di Captain Jack e delle Union Jackshirts, partito fascista immaginario basato sulla British Union of Fascists di Sir Oswald Mosley. Partendo da una breve introduzione del pageant e del ruolo che riveste nella letteratura inglese degli anni ’30, si passa poi alla sua contestualizzazione all’interno delle opere di queste due scrittrici, focalizzandosi, in particolare, sul significato che assume in relazione al quadro storico-politico, culturale e sociale.

The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

<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>

The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

<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>

Late Works (1933–1941)

This chapter traces the development of Woolf’s late feminist politics and aesthetic experimentalism, focusing on her penultimate and final novels, The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), and her anti-war pamphlet, Three Guineas (1938). It reads across these texts and Woolf’s wider writings from 1933–1941, including essays, unpublished drafts, and her fictional biography Flush (1933), to identify key strands of social and political enquiry in Woolf’s late works. The chapter pays particular attention to Woolf’s late analysis of the role of art in society and her evolving feminist-pacifist critique of the links between patriarchy, nationalism, fascism, and war. Rejecting a narrative of creative decline, the chapter highlights the productive relationship between political engagement and formal experiment in Woolf’s late works.

Allusion and Metaphor

This chapter demonstrates that Woolf’s allusive practice involved transforming and interrogating texts rather than invoking the authority of earlier texts or their scholarly interpretations. It shows how Woolf’s allusions are often supported by metaphors that draw attention to the longevity of past literature that is essential to the act of allusion. These include organic metaphors such as the growth of seeds, plants, and flowers; familial metaphors of conception, birth, and reproduction; and the ethereal metaphor of haunting. The chapter examines how Woolf uses allusion and metaphor to articulate relationships with the literary past in A Room of One’s Own and in her representation of characters who are female writers in Night and Day, Orlando, and Between the Acts.

Stream of Consciousness

Few terms are more associated with the innovations of modernist fiction—and Virginia Woolf’s novels in particular—than ‘stream of consciousness’, yet the contours of the term often remain vague. This chapter argues that Woolf makes distinctive contributions to the genre that have been underrecognized both because of its gendered association with formlessness, and because stream of consciousness is often simply conflated with interior monologue, which she mostly did not use. Instead, Woolf’s contributions include her use of free indirect discourse to overcome the egotism of the first person, experiments with rendering collective streams of consciousness in Between the Acts, and finally, her use of analogies to evoke the feeling of thinking, which also illuminates unappreciated links to William James, the psychologist who coined the term together, Woolf’s strategies refute the charge of intense individualism that is often levied at stream-of-consciousness writing.