A Room of One's Own


Book Description

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.




Women and Fiction [A Room of One's Own]


Book Description

2015 Reprint of 1960 Edition. Full Facsimile of the original edition. "Women and Fiction" was first published in the U.S. in Forum Magazine, a prominent literary journal of the 1920's It is the principle essay and title of a series of lectures Woolff delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. This essay and the Lectures would eventually be published as "A Room of One's Own" in 1929. In this essay Woolf traces the reasons for the very limited achievements among women novelists through the centuries. Why did they fail? They failed because they were not financially independent; they failed because they were not intellectually free; they failed because they were denied the fullest worldly experience. Mrs. Woolf imagines what would have happened to a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare (who possessed all his genius) because she lived in the eighteenth century; she insists that, whatever her gifts, no woman in that age of wife-beating could have written the plays. She shows what did happen in the nineteenth century to the Brontes and George Eliot because they lacked full participation in life; even George Eliot, the "emancipated" woman, lived with a man prosaically in St. John's Wood, while Tolstoy roamed the world and lived with gypsies; and "War and Peace" was as impossible for a woman to write then as "Lear" three centuries before. This short essays remains an important feminist text.




A Room of One's Own


Book Description

Discover Virginia Woolf's landmark essay on women’s struggle for independence and creative opportunity A Room of One's Own is one of Virginia Woolf's most influential works and widely recognized for its extraordinary contribution to the women's movement. Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, it is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister, and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. The work was ranked by The Guardian newspaper as number 45 in the 100 World's Best Non-fiction Books. Part of the bestselling Capstone series, this collectible, hard-back edition of A Room of One’s Own includes an insightful introduction by Jessica Gildersleeve that explains the book's place in modernist literature and why it still resonates with contemporary readers. Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf was one of the most forward-thinking English writers of her time. Author of the classic novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies, and a member of the celebrated Bloomsbury Set of intellectuals and artists. Discover why A Room of One's Own is considered among the greatest and most influential works of female empowerment and creativity Learn why Woolf's classic has stood the test of time. Make this attractive, high-quality hardcover edition a permanent addition to your library Enjoy an insightful introduction by Jessica Gildersleeve, who connects the themes of the text to the concerns of today's audience Capstone Classics brings A Room of One's Own to a new generation of readers who can discover how Woolf's book broke new artistic ground and advanced the position of women writers and creatives around the world.




Women & Fiction


Book Description




Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel


Book Description

In Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, Emily Blair explores how nineteenth-century descriptions of femininity saturate both Woolf's fiction and her modernist manifestos. Moving between the Victorian and modernist periods, Blair looks at a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources, including the literature of conduct and household management, as well as autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction. She argues for a reevaluation of Woolf's persistent yet vexed fascination with English domesticity and female creativity by juxtaposing the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, two popular Victorian novelists, against Woolf's own novels and essays. Blair then traces unacknowledged lines of influence and complex interpretations that Woolf attempted to disavow. While reconsidering Woolf's analysis of women and fiction, Blair simultaneously deepens our appreciation of Woolf's work and advances our understanding of feminine aesthetics.




The Novel


Book Description

The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory1900–2000 is a collection of the most influentialwritings on the theory of the novel from the twentiethcentury. Traces the rise of novel theory and the extension of itsinfluence into other disciplines, especially social, cultural andpolitical theory. Broad in scope, including sections on formalism; the ChicagoSchool; structuralism and narratology; deconstruction;psychoanalysis; Marxism; social discourse; gender;post-colonialism; and more. Includes whole essays or chapters wherever possible. Headnotes introduce and link each piece, enabling readers todraw connections between different schools of thought. Encourages students to approach theoretical texts withconfidence, applying the same skills they bring to literarytexts. Includes a volume introduction, a selected bibliography, anindex of topics and short author biographies to support study.




A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas


Book Description

This volume combines two books by Virginia Woolf which are among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. They consider the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence.




Jean Rhys and the Novel As Women's Text


Book Description

Is a woman's writing different from a man's? Many scholars -- and readers -- think so, even thought here has been little examination of the way women's novels enact the theories that women theorists have posited. In Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text, Nancy Harrison makes an important contribution to the exchange of ideas on the writing practice of women and to the scholarship on Jean Rhys. Harrison determines what the form of a well-made women's novel discloses about the conditions of women's communication and the literary production that emerges from them. Devoting the first part of her book to theory and general commentary on Rhys's approach to writing, she then offers perceptive readings of Voyage in the Dark, an early Rhys novel, and Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys's masterpiece written twenty-seven years later. She shows how Rhys uses the terms of a man's discourse, then introduces a woman's (or several women's) discourse as a compelling counterpoint that, in time, becomes prominent and gives each novel its thematic impact. In presenting a continuing dialogue with the dominant language and at the same time making explicit the place of a woman's own language, Rhys gives us a paradigm for a new and basically moral text. Originally published in 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.




A Room of One's Own


Book Description

“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain.” So begins what is widely regarded as the foundation text of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Probably Woolf’s most readable and entertaining book, it was based on papers delivered at Newnham and Girton Colleges—the two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. Never losing sight of her undergraduate audience, Woolf provides a brief history of women’s writing in English, a scathing account of the subtle and not so subtle ways in which women have been discouraged from writing, and a recommendation for how to change matters: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In the process, Woolf takes on women’s economic disadvantages, the underfunding of women’s education, the discouragement of women from certain kinds of (lucrative) work, the ways in which women are socialized into suspicion of each other, and how women participate in their own systemic oppression. Yet, in spite of these weighty subjects, A Room of One’s Own remains throughout funny, light-hearted, engaging for the novice reader while still offering “nuggets” to the worldy-wise. It is, above and beyond all else, a very model of essay writing. This Broadview edition provides a reliable text at a very reasonable price. It contains textual notes but no appendices or introduction.




Woolf’s Ambiguities


Book Description

In a book that compares Virginia Woolf's writing with that of the novelist, actress, and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952), Molly Hite explores the fascinating connections between Woolf's aversion to women's "pleading a cause" in fiction and her narrative technique of complicating, minimizing, or omitting tonal cues. Hite shows how A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Voyage Out borrow from and implicitly criticize Robins's work. Hite presents and develops the concept of narrative tone as a means to enrich and complicate our readings of Woolf's modernist novels. In Woolf's Ambiguities, she argues that the greatest formal innovation in Woolf's fiction is the muting, complicating, or effacing of textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf's narrative prose, Hite proposes, thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. Hite also points out that Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her "essay-nove;" The Pargiters, Woolf created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.