Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears


Book Description

Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears reveals under-acknowledged nineteenth-century legacies which shaped Woolf as a writing woman. Marion Dell identifies significant lines of descent from the lives and works of Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.




Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf


Book Description

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grotta discusses these writers' ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.




Virginia Woolf’s Good Housekeeping Essays


Book Description

In the mid-twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published ‘Six Articles on London Life’ in Good Housekeeping magazine, a popular magazine where fashion, cookery and house decoration is largely featured. This first book-length study of what Woolf calls ‘little articles’ proposes to reassess the commissioned essays and read them in a chronological sequence in their original context as well as in the larger context of Woolf’s work. Drawing primarily on literary theory, intermedial studies, periodical studies and philosophy, this volume argues the essays which provided an original guided tour of London are creative and innovative works, combining several art forms while developing a photographic method. Further investigation examines the construct of Woolf’s essays as intermedial and as partaking both of theory and praxis; intermediality is closely connected here with her defense of a democratic ideal, itself grounded in a dialogue with her forebears. Far from being second-rate, the Good Housekeeping essays bring together aesthetic and political concerns and come out as playing a pivotal role: they redefine the essay as intermedial, signal Woolf’s turn to a more openly committed form of writing, and fit perfectly within Woolf’s essayistic and fictional oeuvre which they in turn illuminate.




Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880 - 1920


Book Description

At the turn of the 20th century, printing and photographic technologies evolved rapidly, leading to the birth of mass media and the rise of the amateur photographer. Demonstrating how this development happened symbiotically with great changes in the shape of British literature, Writing, Authorship and Photography in British Literary Culture, 1880-1920 explores this co-evolution, showing that as both writing and photography became tools of mass dissemination, literary writers were forced to re-evaluate their professional and personal identities. Focusing on four key authors-Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf-each of which had their own private and professional connections to photographs, this book offers valuable historical contexts for contemporary cultural developments and anxieties. At first establishing the authors' response to developing technologies through their non-fiction, personal correspondences and working drafts, Ennis moves on to examine how their perceptions of photography extend into their major works of fiction: A Laodicean, Dracula, The Secret Agent, The Inheritors and The Voyage Out. Reflecting on the first 'graphic revolution' in a world where text and image are now reproduced digitally and circulated en masse and online, Ennis redirects our attention to when image and text appeared alongside each other for the first time and the crises this sparked for authors: how they would respond to increasingly photographic depictions of everyday life, and in turn, how their writing adapted to a distinctly visual mass media.




Behind the Times


Book Description

Virginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a "lady novelist." As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it. Exploring the connections between Woolf's immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation's concerns and controversies to Woolf's considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf's creative works, politics, and criticism in relation to women writers including the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, the novelist and playwright, Lucy Clifford; the novelist and anti-suffragist, Mary Augusta Ward. It explores Woolf's attitudes to late-Victorian women's philanthropy, the social purity movement, and women's suffrage. Closely tracking the ways in which Woolf both followed and departed from these predecessors, Corbett complicates Woolf's identity as a modernist, her navigation of the literary marketplace, her ambivalence about literary professionalism and the mixing of art and politics, and the emergence of feminism as a persistent concern of her work.




Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present


Book Description

Crafting Feminism develops a dynamic study of craft and art-making in modern and contemporary feminist writing. In evocative readings of literary works from Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith, this book expands our sense of transartistic modernist scholarship to encompass process-oriented and medium-specific analyses of textile arts, digital design, collage, photography, painting, and sculpture in literary culture. By integrating these craft practices into the book's enlightening archive, Elkins's theoretical argument extends a reading of craft metaphors into the material present. Crafting Feminism demonstrates how writers have engaged with handiwork across generations and have undertaken the crafting of a new modernity, one that is queer and feminist-threaded, messy, shattered, cut-up, pasted together, preserved, repaired, reflected, and spun out. An avant-garde work of scholarship, this book interweaves queer research methods and interdisciplinary rigor with a series of surprising archival discoveries. Making visible the collaborative, creative features of craft, Elkins captivates readers with generous illustrations and a series of "Techne" interchapters-interludes between longer chapters, which powerfully convey the symbiosis between feminist theory and method, and detail the network of archival influences that underpin this volume's hybrid approach. Foregrounding the work of decentering patriarchal and Eurocentric legacies of artistic authority, Elkins champions the diverse, intergenerational history of craft as a way to reposition intersectional makers at the heart of literary culture. An original and compelling study, Crafting Feminism breaks new ground in modernist and visual studies, digital humanities, and feminist, queer, and critical race theory.




Neo-Victorian Biofiction


Book Description

Highlighting neo-Victorian biofiction’s crucial role in reimagining and augmenting the historical archive, this volume explores the complex ethical consequences of a creative movement of historiographic revisionism, combining biography and fiction in a dialectic tension of empathy and voyeuristic spectacle.




Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives


Book Description

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists’ biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.




Virginia Woolf and Heritage


Book Description

This collection situates Woolf in relation to the past, exploring her rich and varied heritage from a variety of fields while also assessing her own literary and biographical legacy.




Outsiders


Book Description

Prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator and explorer. As society's outsiders, the exceptional subjects of this study inspired a new breed of women—and one another. Finalist of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Literature by the Association of American Publishers Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: they all wrote dazzling books that forever changed the way we see history. In Outsiders, award-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon shows how these five novelists shared more than talent. In a time when a woman's reputation was her security, each of these women lost hers. They were unconstrained by convention, writing against the grain of their contemporaries, prophetically imagining a different future. We have long known the individual greatness of each of these writers, but in linking their creativity to their lives as outcasts, Gordon throws new light on the genius they share. All five lost their mothers in childbirth or at a young age. With no female role model present, they learned from books—and sometimes from an enlightened mentor. Crucially, each had to imagine what a woman could be in order to invent a voice of her own. The passion in their own lives infused their fiction. Writing with passionate intelligence of her own, Gordon reveals that these renegade writers inspired a new breed of women who wished to change a world locked in war, violence, exploitation, and sexual abuse. Gordon's biographies have always shown the indelible connection between life and art: an intuitive, exciting and revealing approach that has been highly praised. In Outsiders, she crafts nuanced portraits of Shelley, Brontë, Eliot, Schreiner and Woolf, naming each of these writers as prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator, and explorer, and shows how they came, they saw, and they left us changed. Today, following the tsunami of women's protest at widespread abuse, we do more than read them; we listen and live with their astonishing bravery and eloquence.