‘A tremor of hope’: Bloomsbury in and after 1918

This article focuses on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury in and after 1918. It looks at the ways in which the Woolfs, together with members of their circle of friends and family, recorded their experience, their political views, and their attitudes towards Germany, the US and Russia during the final months of the First World War and how they received the arrival of peace. Part of the overall argument will be devoted to tracing the means by which Bloomsbury and the various societies and clubs that were related to it tried to maintain continuity during the war years in London, Richmond and Sussex. A main part of the article will then analyse the development of Bloomsbury’s literary and artistic production and the new connections between art, literature and politics that were forged in the aftermath of the founding of the Hogarth Press in 1917.

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for post-secondary students, scholars, and common readers. Feminist to the core, each chapter offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Six parts focus on Woolf’s life, her texts, her experiments, her as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf’s life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. Part II on her works moves chronologically, emphasizing Woolf’s practice of writing essays and reviews alongside her fiction. Chapters on Woolf’s experimentalism pay special attention to the literariness of Woolf’s writing, with opportunity to trace its distinctive watermark while ‘Professions of Writing’, invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the Times Literary Supplement. Part V on ‘Contexts’ moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with the natural world as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. The final part, ‘Afterlives’, demonstrates the many ways Woolf’s reputation continues to grow. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

Literary London

Focusing on the period up to 1924, this chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s engagement with London as much-loved home, as literary subject (from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway), and as professional milieu. It considers Woolf’s roots in Hyde Park Gate, her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the establishment of the Bloomsbury Group. At the same time, this chapter widens the lens to look at the larger London literary scene. This was a resource to which Woolf gained access through a large network of friends, including, but not limited to, other Bloomsbury Group members, and professional contacts acquired through her work as publisher along with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The chapter closes with Woolf’s move back into the ‘centre of things’ in Bloomsbury in 1924 as both she and the press began to outgrow Richmond.

The Hogarth Press

‘Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors.’ Woolf’s 1925 homage to the impact of the Hogarth Press on her career is well known, signifying a new sense of herself as a woman writer in command of the means of creative production. Less well known is how pervasive were her private and public negotiations with the narratological implications of the feminist materialism she cultivated as a printer and publisher. This article reviews the state of the field, re-reads her early short fiction in the context of her typesetting experiments, which resonate with the conflicted history of women in the printing trades, and argues for a revisionist understanding of Woolf’s feminist modernism as isomorphic with the Hogarth Press.

Introduction

With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for scholars and graduate students. Feminist to the core, each chapter examines an aspect of Woolf’s achievement and legacy. Each contribution offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote prolifically and experimentally. In all she wrote and did, she strove for the rights of women artists: she was a feminist. This volume’s six parts take her feminism and her experiments in language as foundational to her legacy: the opening Part I has a biographical focus; then the chapters in Part II examine her career, holistically and chronologically; Part III offers more detail on the extent of her experimental and aesthetic practices, taking aspects of her innovation across multiple genres, examining each along the span of her career; Part IV invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the TLS and Part V ‘Contexts’ moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with expectations of class and gender, the natural world, as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. Finally, ‘Afterlives’ demonstrates the many ways Woolf’s reputation continues to grow, across the globe, and across media, in ideas and in artistic expression. Chapters on Woolf’s engagement with feminism and suffrage are followed by chapters on Woolf’s posthumous influence on conversations around queer and feminist theory. Of particular note is that chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

“why is poetry wholly an elderly taste?”

Woolf’s sense that the novel must respond to poetry is manifest in her first three novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922). In the first, she shows a keen ear for the sound of language, but poetry figures as patriarchal and arguably deadly. In the second, she explores conflicting attitudes toward the English poetic tradition, and poetry occupies a dual role, at once burden and aphrodisiac. And in the third, poetry serves as a tool Woolf adapts for her own use in prose. For four reasons, by 1922 Woolf was able to appreciate poetry of the past: a familiarity with contemporary poetry gained by printing at The Hogarth Press, the deaths of family members who had nurtured poetry’s discouraging associations, an interest in elegy after the personal loss of her brother and the collective loss during World War I, and a comfort with poetry’s techniques in the wake of the form’s diminished power. Strong evidence of Woolf’s turn toward poetry lies in the poetry books in her extant library.

Subaltern Writing in Hag-Seed

<em>Hag-Seed</em> is a re-imagining story of Shakespeare's '<em>The Tempest</em>' written by Margaret Atwood, a famous Canadian writer. <em>Hag-seed</em> is a successful adaptation in The Hogarth Shakespeare Project organized by Hogarth Press. In this novel, Atwood adopts the form “play in play” to recur the whole scene of <em>The Tempest</em>. Through the depictions of minor characters in a prison, the novel presents the dilemma and struggle of marginalized protagonists in front of the power. In the novel, the play directed by Felix criticizes the power abuse and the social oppression suffered by the lower classes and women. Atwood's rewriting of The Tempest aims to reveal the loss of the humanistic concerns in modern society and advocate making “the other” acquire their rights to free speech.

Orlando em traje de gala: a performance das imagens na biografia paródica de Woolf, em edição de Tomaz Tadeu (2015)

Em 1928, Virginia Woolf publica, em sua editora Hogarth Press, o livro Orlando: A biography, composto com nove retratos, entre fotografias e pinturas. Traduzido pela primeira vez por Cecília Meireles em 1948, atualmente Orlando apresenta-se ao público brasileiro em seis traduções diferentes, mas somente em 2015 em edição e tradução de Tomaz Tadeu, tivemos acesso, pela primeira vez, a todo seu paratexto editorial (em conceito expandido de GENETTE, 2009). Tadeu, por meio da coleção Mimo do Grupo Autêntica, ao restaurar o subtítulo e outros elementos paratextuais, especialmente as imagens, torna-se responsável por inserir no mercado literário do Brasil outro perfil do texto e do modernismo woolfianos. Os retratos são imprescindíveis nas negociações dos significados em Orlando, pois caracterizam as personagens visualmente, assim como o biógrafo o faz narrativamente. Imagens e vozes narrativas devem ser concomitantemente equiparadas, porém, à função de agentes duplos, sempre atuando na subversão do binômio realidade/ ficção. As pinturas e as fotografias participam na composição das mudanças (de século, de estilo, de sexo) ao longo do texto, mas em contraposição às palavras do biógrafo, que tentam imprimir-lhes uma função documental, invocando-as como evidências, elas – as imagens – nada provam. Antes, como veremos, forjam.

Helen Southworth. Fresca. A Life in the Making. A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath

The subject of Southworth’s book is Francesca (Fresca) Allinson (1902–1945), a puppeteer, choral conductor, writer and creator of folksongs, whose life was cut short by drowning. She grew up in a gifted and thoroughly non-conformist family. Her brother Adrian, a painter, studied at the Slade school. Her father worked as a doctor at his practice in London, obtaining and practising his own unorthodox convictions about hygiene and diet. As a radical pacifist Fresca helped provide alternative communities for conscientious objectors (COs). Her fictional autobiography A Childhood was published in 1937, by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.