The proliferation of Virginia Woolfs in both high and popular culture, she argues, has transformed the writer into a "star" whose image and authority are persistently claimed or challenged in debates about art, politics, gender, the canon, class, feminism, and fashion."--BOOK JACKET.

The proliferation of Virginia Woolfs in both high and popular culture, she argues, has transformed the writer into a "star" whose image and authority are persistently claimed or challenged in debates about art, politics, gender, the canon, class, feminism, and fashion."--BOOK JACKET.

This book explores Virginia Woolf’s afterlives in contemporary biographical novels and drama. It offers an extensive analysis of a wide array of literary productions in which Virginia Woolf appears as a fictional character or a dramatis persona. It examines how Woolf’s physical and psychological features, as well as the values she stood for, are magnified, reinforced or distorted to serve the authors’ specific agendas. Beyond general theoretical issues about this flourishing genre, this study raises specific questions about the literary and cultural relevance of Woolf’s fictional representations. These contemporary narratives inform us about Woolf’s iconicity, but they also mirror our current literary, cultural and political concerns. Based on a close examination of twenty-five works published between 1972 and 2019, the book surveys various portraits of Woolf as a feminist, pacifist, troubled genius, gifted innovative writer, treacherous, competitive sister and tragic, suicidal character, or, on the contrary, as a caricatural comic spirit, inspirational figure and perspicacious amateur sleuth. By resurrecting Virginia Woolf in contemporary biofiction, whether to enhance or debunk stereotypes about the historical figure, the authors studied here contribute to her continuous reinvention. Their diverse fictional portraits constitute a way to reinforce Woolf’s literary status, re-evaluate her work, rejuvenate critical interpretations and augment her cultural capital in the twenty-first century

This new book examines how a range of authors today perpetuate Virginia Woolf's literary legacy, by creating new forms adapted to their new ages and audiences. Addressing questions about the current penchant for refashioning our canon in order to update, this book will be valuable reading for both students and scholars of Woolf.

Provides a comprehensive guide to the storied Bloomsbury Group, a social circle of prominent intellectuals active during the interwar period.

The story of "Shakespeare's sister" that Virginia Woolf tells in A Room of One's Own has sparked interest in the question of the place of the woman writer in the Renaissance. By now, the process of recovering lost voices of early modern women is well under way. But Woolf's engagement with the Renaissance went deeper than that question indicates, as important as it was. Her writing reveals a lifelong conversation with the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the travel narratives of Hakluyt to the works of Donne, Milton, Montaigne, and of course Shakespeare. The first collection of essays to explore Woolf's Renaissance, Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance reflects an important interdisciplinary development: contributors include Renaissance as well as twentieth-century specialists. Part of a larger movement to explore the intellectual currents shaping our literary and cultural inheritance, these essays speak to a community of readers that includes, in addition to Woolf and Renaissance scholars, anyone interested in the deep roots of modernism, women's studies, or literary history itself.

Approximately 70 papers, abstracts and addresses from the June, 1997 conference. The contributions explore a range of issues raised by the writings and life of Virginia Woolf, including lesbian perspectives of Woolf, the treatment of the body in her work, intellectual influences, the impact of her images in Korean classrooms, and her literary legacy. Distributed by University Press of America. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This volume compiles the latest in scholarship and reviews on Virginia Woolf, the major 20th-century modernist author.