Isobel Hurst
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199283514
- eISBN:
- 9780191712715
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283514.003.0008
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Virginia Woolf's ironic attitude to the classics in On Not Knowing Greek is examined not as the bitterness of a woman who has been excluded from patriarchal culture, but as a fascinating and ...
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Virginia Woolf's ironic attitude to the classics in On Not Knowing Greek is examined not as the bitterness of a woman who has been excluded from patriarchal culture, but as a fascinating and idiosyncratic response to Greek, which owes much to her female predecessors. Not knowing the Greeks is not seen as a gendered deprivation, but a limitation which can only be overcome by using the imagination: finding pleasure in the strangeness of a new language and creating contemporary forms of literature in response to ancient myth are crucial to the development of the woman writer.Less
Virginia Woolf's ironic attitude to the classics in On Not Knowing Greek is examined not as the bitterness of a woman who has been excluded from patriarchal culture, but as a fascinating and idiosyncratic response to Greek, which owes much to her female predecessors. Not knowing the Greeks is not seen as a gendered deprivation, but a limitation which can only be overcome by using the imagination: finding pleasure in the strangeness of a new language and creating contemporary forms of literature in response to ancient myth are crucial to the development of the woman writer.
Alice Fox
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198129882
- eISBN:
- 9780191671876
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth ...
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This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing – letters, diaries, reading notes, drafts of essays, novels, and feminist polemic – are explored in this study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period, and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction.Less
This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing – letters, diaries, reading notes, drafts of essays, novels, and feminist polemic – are explored in this study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period, and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction.
John Batchelor (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182894
- eISBN:
- 9780191673917
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182894.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Is literary biography so widely read for popular, ‘prurient’ reasons, or for ‘reputable’ intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know ...
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Is literary biography so widely read for popular, ‘prurient’ reasons, or for ‘reputable’ intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so scanty? In this revealing new work seventeen leading critics and professional biographers discuss a broad range of issues, including the relationships between biography and autobiography, the problems genre poses, and the literary biographer at work, together with authors, such as Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley, Conrad, and Rochester.Less
Is literary biography so widely read for popular, ‘prurient’ reasons, or for ‘reputable’ intellectual reasons? Is it of interest only in so far as it illuminates a writer's work? How much can we know about a life, such as Shakespeare's, where the documentation is so scanty? In this revealing new work seventeen leading critics and professional biographers discuss a broad range of issues, including the relationships between biography and autobiography, the problems genre poses, and the literary biographer at work, together with authors, such as Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley, Conrad, and Rochester.
Angela Smith
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183983
- eISBN:
- 9780191674167
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183983.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) described being haunted by her in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and ...
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Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) described being haunted by her in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, this book explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Their particular inflection of modernism is interpreted through their shared experience as ‘threshold people’, familiar with the liminal, for each of them a zone of transition and habitation. Writing at a time when the First World War and changing attitudes to empire problematized boundaries and definitions of foreignness, this book shows how the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterised by moments of disorienting suspension in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, and the domestic made menacing.Less
Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) described being haunted by her in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, this book explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Their particular inflection of modernism is interpreted through their shared experience as ‘threshold people’, familiar with the liminal, for each of them a zone of transition and habitation. Writing at a time when the First World War and changing attitudes to empire problematized boundaries and definitions of foreignness, this book shows how the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterised by moments of disorienting suspension in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, and the domestic made menacing.
William Bain
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- April 2004
- ISBN:
- 9780199260263
- eISBN:
- 9780191600975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199260265.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
Starts by pointing out that if the Berlin and Brussels Acts and the experience of the Congo Free State (as discussed in the last chapter) are understood as representing the internationalization of ...
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Starts by pointing out that if the Berlin and Brussels Acts and the experience of the Congo Free State (as discussed in the last chapter) are understood as representing the internationalization of the idea of trusteeship, then the League of Nations mandates system might be understood as representing its institutionalization in international society. Examines the current of ideas from which the institutionalization of trusteeship arose out of the debates concerning the disposal of German colonies conquered during the First World War, and the subsequent compromise that resulted in the creation of the mandates system, which stands as a response to the problem of ordering relations of Europeans and non‐Europeans by reconciling the obligations of trusteeship and the search for national security in a single institutional arrangement. The victorious Allied powers divided Germany's colonial possessions amongst themselves, in no small part for reasons of national security, but in assuming administrative responsibility for these territories they also accepted the oversight of ‘international machinery’ to ensure that the work of civilization was being done. The seven sections of the chapter are: War and the Old Diplomacy; Trusteeship or Annexation?; From the New World—the effect of the Russian revolution and the entry into the First World War of the US on the French and British annexation policy and Woodrow Wilson's ideas for peace; The Mandates System—the birth of the League of Nations; Impasse at Versailles—the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Versailles Peace Treaty; Trusteeship or Deception—the obligations and defects of the League of Nations Covenant; and Novelty and Tradition—the compromise of the League of Nations system.Less
Starts by pointing out that if the Berlin and Brussels Acts and the experience of the Congo Free State (as discussed in the last chapter) are understood as representing the internationalization of the idea of trusteeship, then the League of Nations mandates system might be understood as representing its institutionalization in international society. Examines the current of ideas from which the institutionalization of trusteeship arose out of the debates concerning the disposal of German colonies conquered during the First World War, and the subsequent compromise that resulted in the creation of the mandates system, which stands as a response to the problem of ordering relations of Europeans and non‐Europeans by reconciling the obligations of trusteeship and the search for national security in a single institutional arrangement. The victorious Allied powers divided Germany's colonial possessions amongst themselves, in no small part for reasons of national security, but in assuming administrative responsibility for these territories they also accepted the oversight of ‘international machinery’ to ensure that the work of civilization was being done. The seven sections of the chapter are: War and the Old Diplomacy; Trusteeship or Annexation?; From the New World—the effect of the Russian revolution and the entry into the First World War of the US on the French and British annexation policy and Woodrow Wilson's ideas for peace; The Mandates System—the birth of the League of Nations; Impasse at Versailles—the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Versailles Peace Treaty; Trusteeship or Deception—the obligations and defects of the League of Nations Covenant; and Novelty and Tradition—the compromise of the League of Nations system.
Angela Frattarola
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780813056074
- eISBN:
- 9780813053868
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813056074.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, ...
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Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.Less
Modernist Soundscapes questions how early twentieth-century auditory technologies altered sound perception, and how these developments shaped the modernist novel. As the phonograph, telephone, talkie, and radio created new paths for connectivity and intimacy, modernist writers such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf were crafting characters intimately connected by the prosody of voice, music, and the soundscape. As headphones piped nonlocal sounds into a listener’s headspace, Jean Rhys and James Joyce were creating interior monologues that were shaped by cosmopolitan and bohemian sounds. As the phonograph and tape recorder aestheticized noise through mechanical reproduction, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett were deploying onomatopoeia and repetition to aestheticize words and make them sound out. Modernist Soundscapes encourages us to listen to these auditory narratives in order to grasp how the formal and linguistic experiments we have come to associate with modernism are partially a consequence of this historical attentiveness to sound. This heightened awareness of audition coincided with an emerging skepticism toward vision. Indeed, modernist writers turned to sound perception as a way to complicate the dominance of vision—a sensibility rooted in Greek philosophy that equated seeing with knowledge and truth. Without polarizing vision and audition, this book reveals how modernists tend to use auditory perception to connect characters, shifting the subject from a distanced, judgmental observer to a reverberating body, attuned to the moment.
Stanley Weintraub
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780813037264
- eISBN:
- 9780813041544
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813037264.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
People known to Bernard Shaw had every reason to fear becoming recognizable characters in his plays. Whether from history, literature, or his own crowded career, Shaw's relationships to real or ...
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People known to Bernard Shaw had every reason to fear becoming recognizable characters in his plays. Whether from history, literature, or his own crowded career, Shaw's relationships to real or imagined personalities reveal a complexity beyond easy formulation. He put himself into a Jesus, a Caesar, a Cetewayo, a Napoleon, and even into an Edward VIII. Shaw rehabilitated the shocking Lady Colin Campbell and reinvented Virginia Woolf. What he was not, or could not be, himself, became indirectly and imaginatively parts of other personalities, past and present. The lives in this book are a sampling, extraordinary only in being dimensions of Bernard Shaw.Less
People known to Bernard Shaw had every reason to fear becoming recognizable characters in his plays. Whether from history, literature, or his own crowded career, Shaw's relationships to real or imagined personalities reveal a complexity beyond easy formulation. He put himself into a Jesus, a Caesar, a Cetewayo, a Napoleon, and even into an Edward VIII. Shaw rehabilitated the shocking Lady Colin Campbell and reinvented Virginia Woolf. What he was not, or could not be, himself, became indirectly and imaginatively parts of other personalities, past and present. The lives in this book are a sampling, extraordinary only in being dimensions of Bernard Shaw.
Lecia Rosenthal
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823233977
- eISBN:
- 9780823241200
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. ...
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This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussions of the century's passion for the real, and taking on the century's late aesthetics of subtraction, the book reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, it reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.Less
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussions of the century's passion for the real, and taking on the century's late aesthetics of subtraction, the book reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, it reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.
Melanie Micir
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691193113
- eISBN:
- 9780691194271
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691193113.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines ...
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It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others. The book explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field. Arguing for the importance of biography, the book shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.Less
It's impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century. But this was not always so. This book examines biographical projects that modernist women writers undertook to resist the exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, and companions from literary history. Many of these works were vibrant efforts of modernist countermemory and counterhistory that became casualties in a midcentury battle for literary legitimacy, but that now add a new dimension to our appreciation of such figures as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, Hope Mirrlees, and Sylvia Beach, among many others. The book explores an extensive body of material, including Sylvia Townsend Warner's carefullly annotated letters to her partner Valentine Ackland, Djuna Barnes's fragmented drafts about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Margaret Anderson's collection of modernist artifacts, and Virginia Woolf's joke biography of her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the novel Orlando. Whether published in encoded desire or squirreled away in intimate archives, these “passion projects” recorded life then in order to summon an audience now, and stand as important predecessors of queer and feminist recovery projects that have shaped the contemporary understanding of the field. Arguing for the importance of biography, the book shows how women turned to this genre in the early twentieth century to preserve their lives and communities for future generations to discover.
Mark Kinkead-Weekes
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263181
- eISBN:
- 9780191734595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263181.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
There could be different ways of writing biographies, just as there are different kinds of novels. Modern biographers who are sensitive to the trends in fiction and criticism may avoid the ...
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There could be different ways of writing biographies, just as there are different kinds of novels. Modern biographers who are sensitive to the trends in fiction and criticism may avoid the chronological approach, as it is often seen as old-fashioned. They may prefer a more subtle kind of structuring; for instance, Hermione Lee, who wrote Virginia Woolf's life, argued that there are several ways in which a ‘Life’ may begin apart from the start of the subject's birth. Likewise, Jean Sartre asserted the need to use an inverted chronology wherein regression should come first before progress can be properly grounded. This chapter discusses the chronological biography and, in particular, strict chronological biography. First, it examines D.H. Lawrence's biography, which is arranged and structured chronologically, and considers two biographies that are arranged in innovatory ways: Sartre's biography of Flaubert and Lee's narrative of Virginia Woolf. While Sartre and Lee's methods were interesting, the chronological approach, however old-fashioned, has positive aspects: it allows miming of the reader of how a life may have felt to live; throws emphasis on the experience of the biographee rather than commentary of the biographer; allows the reader to watch the life as it unfolds rather than having its significance anticipated; and delays verdicts until there has been sufficient exploration of the process and development.Less
There could be different ways of writing biographies, just as there are different kinds of novels. Modern biographers who are sensitive to the trends in fiction and criticism may avoid the chronological approach, as it is often seen as old-fashioned. They may prefer a more subtle kind of structuring; for instance, Hermione Lee, who wrote Virginia Woolf's life, argued that there are several ways in which a ‘Life’ may begin apart from the start of the subject's birth. Likewise, Jean Sartre asserted the need to use an inverted chronology wherein regression should come first before progress can be properly grounded. This chapter discusses the chronological biography and, in particular, strict chronological biography. First, it examines D.H. Lawrence's biography, which is arranged and structured chronologically, and considers two biographies that are arranged in innovatory ways: Sartre's biography of Flaubert and Lee's narrative of Virginia Woolf. While Sartre and Lee's methods were interesting, the chronological approach, however old-fashioned, has positive aspects: it allows miming of the reader of how a life may have felt to live; throws emphasis on the experience of the biographee rather than commentary of the biographer; allows the reader to watch the life as it unfolds rather than having its significance anticipated; and delays verdicts until there has been sufficient exploration of the process and development.
Jonathan Atkin
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060700
- eISBN:
- 9781781700105
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060700.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and ...
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The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.Less
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; ...
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This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.Less
This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.
Philip Waller
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199541201
- eISBN:
- 9780191717284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541201.003.0028
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter explores how writers dealt with religion. It shows how a long list of authors, led by Dickens and George Eliot, provided unsympathetic portraits of Nonconformists, fixing on their ...
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This chapter explores how writers dealt with religion. It shows how a long list of authors, led by Dickens and George Eliot, provided unsympathetic portraits of Nonconformists, fixing on their apparent hypocrisy, intolerance, philistinism, and sharp practice. A curious exception is noted in regard to treatment of members of the Salvation Army by Walter Besant and George Moore, who were otherwise antipathetic to much religion. It is argued that a general hostility to institutionalised Christianity, together with a propensity to analyse character in sociological and psychological rather than metaphysical terms, distinguish many of the writers whose work is still read today. Yet one reason for the success of many best-selling novels and stage hits of the late-Victorian and Edwardian period was their reverential attitude to religious faith; and this has opened up a gap in understanding and taste between our age and theirs. The religious faith so expressed may have been doctrinally unsophisticated and even downright ignorant or assumed for the occasion; but it was not mocking; and this accorded with majority opinion then. Writers whose work is scrutinised in this regard include Wilson Barrett, Arnold Bennett, Henry James, Jerome K. Jerome, Stephen Phillips, George Bernard Shaw, J.H. Shorthouse, W. T. Stead, ‘Guy Thorne’, Mrs Humphry Ward, H. G. Wells, and Charlotte M. Yonge. The book ends with an analysis of Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out (1915), which epitomises this shift in the focus of modern fiction.Less
This chapter explores how writers dealt with religion. It shows how a long list of authors, led by Dickens and George Eliot, provided unsympathetic portraits of Nonconformists, fixing on their apparent hypocrisy, intolerance, philistinism, and sharp practice. A curious exception is noted in regard to treatment of members of the Salvation Army by Walter Besant and George Moore, who were otherwise antipathetic to much religion. It is argued that a general hostility to institutionalised Christianity, together with a propensity to analyse character in sociological and psychological rather than metaphysical terms, distinguish many of the writers whose work is still read today. Yet one reason for the success of many best-selling novels and stage hits of the late-Victorian and Edwardian period was their reverential attitude to religious faith; and this has opened up a gap in understanding and taste between our age and theirs. The religious faith so expressed may have been doctrinally unsophisticated and even downright ignorant or assumed for the occasion; but it was not mocking; and this accorded with majority opinion then. Writers whose work is scrutinised in this regard include Wilson Barrett, Arnold Bennett, Henry James, Jerome K. Jerome, Stephen Phillips, George Bernard Shaw, J.H. Shorthouse, W. T. Stead, ‘Guy Thorne’, Mrs Humphry Ward, H. G. Wells, and Charlotte M. Yonge. The book ends with an analysis of Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out (1915), which epitomises this shift in the focus of modern fiction.
Ross Cranston
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199292073
- eISBN:
- 9780191700699
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199292073.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Legal Profession and Ethics
Access to justice, equality before the law, and the rule of law are three fundamental values underpinning the civil justice system. This book examines these values and ...
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Access to justice, equality before the law, and the rule of law are three fundamental values underpinning the civil justice system. This book examines these values and how they are a crucial foundation of the civil justice system and a powerful argument for arrangements such as legal aid, the impartial application of law, and the independence of the judiciary. It also considers the role of procedure, often regarded as of secondary importance compared with substantive law. It discusses Lord Woolf's inquiry, and demonstrates how procedural reform can maximize a fundamental value like access to justice. This linkage is furthered in a later analysis of access to justice comparatively, in relation to civil and commercial law. It then looks at understanding how law works, and how it could be made to work better, and concludes that this demands both knowledge of law and of law's context. This theme deals with the machinery of the law, and discusses what the courts do, civil procedure, and the ethics of lawyers' conduct, all in relation to the broader context of access to justice. This broader context of the law is particularly prominent in the latter half of the book, which deals with various dimensions of the impact of the law.Less
Access to justice, equality before the law, and the rule of law are three fundamental values underpinning the civil justice system. This book examines these values and how they are a crucial foundation of the civil justice system and a powerful argument for arrangements such as legal aid, the impartial application of law, and the independence of the judiciary. It also considers the role of procedure, often regarded as of secondary importance compared with substantive law. It discusses Lord Woolf's inquiry, and demonstrates how procedural reform can maximize a fundamental value like access to justice. This linkage is furthered in a later analysis of access to justice comparatively, in relation to civil and commercial law. It then looks at understanding how law works, and how it could be made to work better, and concludes that this demands both knowledge of law and of law's context. This theme deals with the machinery of the law, and discusses what the courts do, civil procedure, and the ethics of lawyers' conduct, all in relation to the broader context of access to justice. This broader context of the law is particularly prominent in the latter half of the book, which deals with various dimensions of the impact of the law.
Ruth Livesey
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263983
- eISBN:
- 9780191734731
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263983.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from a ...
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This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from a desire for a new beauty of life; beauty that also, for many, required them to reject the sexual conventions of the Victorian era. From the early 1880s and well into the twentieth century, the efforts of these writers and activists existed in critical tension with other contemporary developments in literary culture. This book maps the ongoing dialogue between socialist writers like William Morris, decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and defining figures of early modernism including Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry. The book concludes that socialist writers developed a distinct political aesthetic in which the love of beauty was to act as a force for revolutionary change. The book draws on archival research and extensive study of socialist periodicals, together with readings of works by writers including Morris, Wilde, Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, Isabella Ford, Carpenter, Alfred Orage, Woolf and Fry. The book uncovers the lasting influence of socialist writers of the 1880s on the emergence of British literary modernism and by tracing the lives of neglected writers and activists such as Clementina Black and Dollie Radford, it provides a vivid evocation of an era in which revolution seemed imminent and the arts were a vital route to that future.Less
This book brings to life the growth of the socialist movement among men and women artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Britain. For these campaigners, socialism was inseparable from a desire for a new beauty of life; beauty that also, for many, required them to reject the sexual conventions of the Victorian era. From the early 1880s and well into the twentieth century, the efforts of these writers and activists existed in critical tension with other contemporary developments in literary culture. This book maps the ongoing dialogue between socialist writers like William Morris, decadent aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and defining figures of early modernism including Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry. The book concludes that socialist writers developed a distinct political aesthetic in which the love of beauty was to act as a force for revolutionary change. The book draws on archival research and extensive study of socialist periodicals, together with readings of works by writers including Morris, Wilde, Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, Isabella Ford, Carpenter, Alfred Orage, Woolf and Fry. The book uncovers the lasting influence of socialist writers of the 1880s on the emergence of British literary modernism and by tracing the lives of neglected writers and activists such as Clementina Black and Dollie Radford, it provides a vivid evocation of an era in which revolution seemed imminent and the arts were a vital route to that future.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist ...
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This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.Less
This shorter chapter is really a coda to the first half of the book, arguing that an alternative contemporary response to the disturbance in life‐writing is represented by the impressionist autobiographies of the novelists Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. It discusses the recent rehabilitation of the concept of literary impressionism in theoretical studies of fiction. While its discussion of the impression looks back to the studies of Pater, Ruskin, and Proust, it also looks forward to the modernists discussed in Part II.
Ruth Livesey
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263983
- eISBN:
- 9780191734731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263983.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged ...
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This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged aesthetics of those Bloomsbury socialists before the Bloomsbury Group. Both Woolf and Fry had significant relations with writers examined in earlier chapters of this work. Woolf's writings concerning the Women's Co-operative Guild reflect her rejection of the socially engaged and productive aesthetics of that generation in favour of a radical statement of aesthetic autonomy and the individualism of the artist. Meanwhile, Roger Fry's aesthetics strained between a belief in a democracy of aesthetic responsiveness and a conscious attempt to rewrite the aesthetic legacy of Ruskin and Morris. In the debacle that surrounded Wyndham Lewis's secession from Fry's collective Omega Workshops, however, Lewis himself sexed Fry's aesthetics as effeminate traces of the fin de siècle.Less
This chapter examines the afterlife of 1880s socialism in the early modernist generation. It focuses upon Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry and examines their negotiations with the productive, engaged aesthetics of those Bloomsbury socialists before the Bloomsbury Group. Both Woolf and Fry had significant relations with writers examined in earlier chapters of this work. Woolf's writings concerning the Women's Co-operative Guild reflect her rejection of the socially engaged and productive aesthetics of that generation in favour of a radical statement of aesthetic autonomy and the individualism of the artist. Meanwhile, Roger Fry's aesthetics strained between a belief in a democracy of aesthetic responsiveness and a conscious attempt to rewrite the aesthetic legacy of Ruskin and Morris. In the debacle that surrounded Wyndham Lewis's secession from Fry's collective Omega Workshops, however, Lewis himself sexed Fry's aesthetics as effeminate traces of the fin de siècle.
Elizabeth Outka
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195372694
- eISBN:
- 9780199871704
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372694.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter moves from the department stores discussed in the previous chapter to the individual consumer gaze, examining the rapid growth and cultural importance of carefully constructed displays ...
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This chapter moves from the department stores discussed in the previous chapter to the individual consumer gaze, examining the rapid growth and cultural importance of carefully constructed displays of “authentic” goods. The early writings of Virginia Woolf, including her novel Night and Day, structure the analysis of window shopping and self-fashioning before and after World War I. Both the fictional and the actual displays left behind the crowded, though often lavish, arrangements of the Victorian store window to present less cluttered exhibits with clean lines and single objects. The chapter explores how Selfridges, Woolf, and the new window displays satisfied in different ways some of the contradictory desires of the modern subject: the longing for the noncommercial, the pleasure in distinguishing between high and low culture, and a modern wish to acknowledge and even celebrate the constructed nature of this satisfaction. These very desires became a critical part of the modernist project, as such strategies promised to transcend distinctions between the “authentic” and the mass-produced, between an aesthetic modernism and a commercial modernity.Less
This chapter moves from the department stores discussed in the previous chapter to the individual consumer gaze, examining the rapid growth and cultural importance of carefully constructed displays of “authentic” goods. The early writings of Virginia Woolf, including her novel Night and Day, structure the analysis of window shopping and self-fashioning before and after World War I. Both the fictional and the actual displays left behind the crowded, though often lavish, arrangements of the Victorian store window to present less cluttered exhibits with clean lines and single objects. The chapter explores how Selfridges, Woolf, and the new window displays satisfied in different ways some of the contradictory desires of the modern subject: the longing for the noncommercial, the pleasure in distinguishing between high and low culture, and a modern wish to acknowledge and even celebrate the constructed nature of this satisfaction. These very desires became a critical part of the modernist project, as such strategies promised to transcend distinctions between the “authentic” and the mass-produced, between an aesthetic modernism and a commercial modernity.
Elizabeth Outka
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195372694
- eISBN:
- 9780199871704
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372694.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely ...
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The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely hybridized blend of nostalgia and modernity. The chapter investigates how the commodified authentic became a critical modernist tool, analyzing key moments concerning advertising, authenticity, and shopping in works by D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love), James Joyce (Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse). The chapter concludes by exploring how the commodified authentic remains a powerful marketing technique and cultural strategy.Less
The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely hybridized blend of nostalgia and modernity. The chapter investigates how the commodified authentic became a critical modernist tool, analyzing key moments concerning advertising, authenticity, and shopping in works by D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love), James Joyce (Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse). The chapter concludes by exploring how the commodified authentic remains a powerful marketing technique and cultural strategy.
John Kekes
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199546923
- eISBN:
- 9780191720109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199546923.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Enjoyment is an essential part of good lives. The development of a style of life is one way of achieving it. Moralism that stresses responsibility and ignores enjoyment makes good lives impossible ...
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Enjoyment is an essential part of good lives. The development of a style of life is one way of achieving it. Moralism that stresses responsibility and ignores enjoyment makes good lives impossible and gives a bad name to morality. Although styles of life vary with individuals, reasonable and unreasonable ones can be distinguished. Styles of life described by Drabble, Trollope, and Woolf are examined.Less
Enjoyment is an essential part of good lives. The development of a style of life is one way of achieving it. Moralism that stresses responsibility and ignores enjoyment makes good lives impossible and gives a bad name to morality. Although styles of life vary with individuals, reasonable and unreasonable ones can be distinguished. Styles of life described by Drabble, Trollope, and Woolf are examined.
