After the Modernist literary experiments of her earlier work, Virginia Woolf became increasingly concerned with overt social and political commentary in her later writings, which are preoccupied with dissecting the links between patriarchy, patriotism, imperialism and war. This book unravels the complex textual histories of The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941) to expose the genesis and evolution of Virginia Woolf's late cultural criticism. Fusing a feminist-historicist approach with the practices and principles of genetic criticism, this innovative study scrutinizes a range of holograph, typescript and proof documents within their historical context to uncover the writing and thinking processes that produced Woolf's cultural analysis during 1931-1941. By demonstrating that Woolf's late cultural criticism developed through her literary experimentalism as well as in response to contemporary social, political and economic upheavals, this book offers a fresh perspective on her emergence as a cultural commentator in her final decade and paves the way for further genetic enquiries in the field.

Drawing on a rich array of archival sources and historical detail, The Politics of 1930s British Literature tells the story of a school-minded decade and illuminates new readings of the politics and aesthetics of 1930s literature. In a period of shifting political claims, educational policy shaped writers' social and gender ideals. This book explores how a wide array of writers including Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Winifred Holtby and Graham Greene were informed by their pedagogic work. It considers the ways in which education influenced writers' analysis of literary style and their conception of future literary forms. The Politics of 1930s British Literature argues that to those perennial symbols of the 1930s, the loudspeaker and the gramophone, should be added the textbook and the blackboard.

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. Six sections focus on Woolf's life, her texts, her experiments, her life as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf's life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. The section 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 TLS. The 'Contexts' section 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 section on afterlives demonstrates the many ways Woolf's reputation continues to grow, across the globe, and across media, in ideas and in artistic expression. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

Virginia Woolf was one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century—a major literary stylist and a lyrical novelist whose stream-of-consciousness approach in iconic books such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando would inspire generations of writers to follow. She was also one of the first to address the injustices of gender disparity and the ravages of World War I at home. Uncovering new details about Woolf’s life and the places she inhabited, this engaging biography offers fresh insights into her works and legacy, focusing on the ways place and imagination intertwine in her writing. Drawing on Woolf’s letters, journals, diaries, autobiographical essays, and fiction, Ira Nadel paints a portrait of the writer in situ, whether in the enclosed surroundings of Hyde Park Gate or the open and free-spirited environs of Gordon Square’s Bloomsbury. He shows how Woolf’s experimental style was informed by her own reading life and how her deeply sensitive understanding of history, narrative, art, and friendship were rendered in her prose. He explores the famous Bloomsbury group of intellectuals in which she was immersed as well as her relationships with fascinating figures such as Vita Sackville-West and Lady Ottoline Morrel. Nadel looks at Woolf’s attitudes toward sex and marriage, analyzes her uncertain social and political views, and, finally, offers a sensitive examination of her mental instabilities and the nervous breakdowns that would plague her for most of her life, up until her suicide in 1941. A moving account of an exceptional writer who ushered in a new era of literature, this biography perfectly captures the intricate relationship between art and life.

This volume asks how Woolf conceptualized peace by exploring various experimental forms she created in response to violence and crisis. Across fifteen chapters written by an international array of scholars, this book draws out theoretical dimensions of Woolf’s aesthetics and deepens our understanding of her writing about war, ethics, feminism and European culture.

In November 2011, academics from across the disciplines came together to discuss the idea of suffering. This book is a product of that meeting, bringing together the ideas of 17 authors to discuss, from different perspectives, what does it mean to suffer and can meaning be made out of suffering?

After the Modernist literary experiments of her earlier work, Virginia Woolf became increasingly concerned with overt social and political commentary in her later writings, which are preoccupied with dissecting the links between patriarchy, patriotism, imperialism and war. This book unravels the complex textual histories of The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941) to expose the genesis and evolution of Virginia Woolf's late cultural criticism. Fusing a feminist-historicist approach with the practices and principles of genetic criticism, this innovative study scrutiniz.

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