Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language


Book Description

Virginia Woolf's rich and imaginative use of language was partly a result of her keen interest in foreign literatures and languages - mainly Greek and French, but also Russian, German and Italian. As a translator she naturally addressed herself both to contemporary standards of translation within the university, but also to readers like herself. In Three Guineas she ranged herself among German scholars who used Antigone to critique European politics of the 1930s. Orlando outwits the censors with a strategy that focuses on Proust's untranslatable word. The Waves and The Years show her looking ahead to the problems of postcolonial society, where translation crosses borders. In this in-depth study of Woolf and European languages and literatures, Emily Dalgarno opens up a rewarding new way of reading her prose.




Virginia Woolf


Book Description

Reconsiders Virginia Woolf's work for the 21st century focusing on coevolution, duality and contradiction. These eleven newly commissioned essays represent the evolution, or coevolution, of Woolf studies in the early twenty-first century. Divided into five parts. Self and Identity; Language and Translation; Culture and Commodification; Human, Animal and Nonhuman; and Genders, Sexualities and Multiplicities, the essays represent the most recent scholarship on the subjective, provisional, and contingent nature of Woolf's work. The expert contributors consider unstable constructions of self and identity, and language and translation from multiple angles, including shifting textualities, culture and the marketplace, critical animal studies, and discourses that fracture and revise gender and sexuality.Key Features: - Extends existing critical work that considers a multiplicity of constructions of Virginia Woolf- Demonstrates original and diverse ways of reading this canonical (and contradictory) author- Explores multiple meanings related to the conjoined, fused, connected and evolving nature of Woolf studies- Considers new configurations, new pairings, and new ways of placing ideas in tension around Woolf's work for a postmodern, postmillennial eraEditor bio: Jeanne Dubino is Professor of English and Global Studies, Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies, Appalachian State University, Boone. Gill Lowe is Senior Lecturer in English at University Campus Suffolk, School of Arts and Humanities, University Campus Suffolk. Vara Neverow is Professor of English and Women's Studies, English Department, Engleman Hall, Southern Connecticut State University. Kathryn Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University.




Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy


Book Description

In Woolf's writings Greece and Greek tragedy in particular shape an exoticized aesthetic space that both emerges from and enables critique of the cosy settings and colonialist conceits of elite (and largely male) British attitudes toward culture and politics. Rather than highlighting Woolf's exclusion from male intellectual purviews, as so many scholars have emphasized, this book urges attention on how her engagements with Greek tragedy both collude with and challenge modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics. Woolf's encounters with and uses of Greek tragedy fantasize an alternative perceptual capacity that correlates to feminine (and feminist) modes, which are depicted in her writings as alternately defiant and choral. In this scheme, Greek tragedy is something of a dreamland, the mysterious dynamics of which Woolf treats as transcending cultural attitudes that hinge upon imperialist adventuring and violence. As scholars have recognized, especially in recent decades, the exoticizing gestures central to the work of so many modernists have uncomfortable political underpinnings, since they frequently inhabit imperialist and colonialist perspectives while appearing to critique them. Unlike most scholars, Nancy Worman argues that Woolf is no exception, although the feminism and humour that inflects so many "Greek" elements in her work saves it from the worst offenses.




Virginia Woolf: Writing the World


Book Description

Addresses such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf’s reception as a world writer, world wars and the centenary of the First World War, and natural worlds in Woolf’s writings.




Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf


Book Description

Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf offers an expansive interdisciplinary study of spirituality in Virginia Woolf's writing, drawing on theology, psychology, geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other critical fields. The essays in this collection interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual, and to Woolf’s work, while contributing to a larger critical reappraisal of modernism, religion, and secularism. While Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become critical commonplaces, her sometimes withering critique of religion conflicts with what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. The essays collected here take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life's meaning in light of her disparaging attitude toward religion. These essays argue that Woolf's writing reframes and reclaims the spiritual in alternate forms; she strives to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain after the death of God has been pronounced.




Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace


Book Description

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.




Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace


Book Description

Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Transnational Circulations enlarges our understanding of Virginia Woolf’s pacifist ideology and aesthetic response to the World Wars by re-examining her writings and cultural contexts transnationally and comparatively through the complex interplay between modernism, politics, and aesthetics. The “transnational” paradigm that undergirds this collection revolves around the idea of transnational cultural communities of writers, artists, and musicians worldwide who were intellectually involved in the war effort through the forging of pacifist cultural networks that arose as a form of resistance to war, militarism, and the rise of fascism. The book also offers philosophical approaches to notions of transnational pacifism, anti-war ethics, and decolonization, examining how Woolf’s prose undermines center/edge or self/other bifurcations. Breathing new life into Woolf’s anti-war writings through a transnational lens and presenting us with the voices and perspectives of a range of significant scholars and critics, the chapters in this volume engage with mobile and circulatory pacifisms, calling attention to the intersections of modernist inquiries across the arts (art, music, literature, and performance) and transnational critical spaces (Asia, Europe, and the Americas) to show how the convergence of different cultural and linguistic horizons can significantly expand and enrich our understanding of Woolf’s modernist legacy.




Virginia Woolf in Context


Book Description

As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context - whether historical, cultural, or theoretical - is to be understood in relation to her work and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender and class and the bearings of colonialism, empire and war.




A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology


Book Description

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology presents a collection of essays that explore a wide variety of aspects of Greek and Roman myths and their critical reception from antiquity to the present day. Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination, and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Offers a series of carefully selected in-depth readings, including both popular and less well-known examples




The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf


Book Description

A Handbook on Woolf's achievements as an innovative novelist and pioneering feminist theorist. It studies her life, her works, her relationships with other writers, her professional career, and themes in her work including among others feminism, sexuality, education, and class.