Virginia Woolf Against Empire

Virginia Woolf Against Empire PDF Author: Kathy J. Phillips
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780870498336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
From her first book to her last, Virginia Woolf consistently satirized British society. Only in recent years, however, has Woolf been recognized as a political thinker, let alone one with a sophisticated grasp of complex ideologies. In Virginia Woolf against Empire, Kathy J. Phillips makes a major contribution to the growing recognition of Woolf as a cultural commentator. Phillips argues that Woolf satirizes social institutions largely through incongruous juxtapositions that link empire making, militarism, and gender relations. One of Woolf's key insights, Phillips shows, is her exposure of a pervasive cultural image that equates women and land - a metaphor resulting from her culture's displacement of sexuality onto militarism and the transference of the individual's need to be included into an all-embracing empire. As Woolf's novels demonstrate, the metaphor works in both directions: to corrupt the relation of men to women with possessiveness and to turn England's relation to its colonies into a kind of substitute for sexual gratification. A unique feature of this study is Phillips's investigation of how Leonard Woolf's books on colonialism specifically influenced Virginia Woolf's novels and vice versa. Virginia Woolf drew her concepts of political systems and theories from her husband's anti-imperialist writings. Phillips also shows how specific factual details from Leonard Woolf's books help to illuminate some of Virginia Woolf's metaphors and allusions.

Virginia Woolf Against Empire

Virginia Woolf Against Empire PDF Author: Kathy J. Phillips
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780870498336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description
From her first book to her last, Virginia Woolf consistently satirized British society. Only in recent years, however, has Woolf been recognized as a political thinker, let alone one with a sophisticated grasp of complex ideologies. In Virginia Woolf against Empire, Kathy J. Phillips makes a major contribution to the growing recognition of Woolf as a cultural commentator. Phillips argues that Woolf satirizes social institutions largely through incongruous juxtapositions that link empire making, militarism, and gender relations. One of Woolf's key insights, Phillips shows, is her exposure of a pervasive cultural image that equates women and land - a metaphor resulting from her culture's displacement of sexuality onto militarism and the transference of the individual's need to be included into an all-embracing empire. As Woolf's novels demonstrate, the metaphor works in both directions: to corrupt the relation of men to women with possessiveness and to turn England's relation to its colonies into a kind of substitute for sexual gratification. A unique feature of this study is Phillips's investigation of how Leonard Woolf's books on colonialism specifically influenced Virginia Woolf's novels and vice versa. Virginia Woolf drew her concepts of political systems and theories from her husband's anti-imperialist writings. Phillips also shows how specific factual details from Leonard Woolf's books help to illuminate some of Virginia Woolf's metaphors and allusions.

Lesbian Empire

Lesbian Empire PDF Author: Gay Wachman
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813529424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
A critical reading of sexually radical fiction by British women in the years during and after World War I. Gay Wachman examines work by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf and Radclyffe Hall, along with the less well known Clemence Dane, Rose Allatini and Evadne Price. These writers, she states, created a modernist literary tradition -one that functioned both within and against the repressive ideology of the British Empire.

Virginia Woolf: Writing the World

Virginia Woolf: Writing the World PDF Author: Pamela L. Caughie
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 0990895815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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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.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf PDF Author: Susan Sellers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107495539
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf's writing has generated passion and controversy for the best part of a century. Her novels - challenging, moving, and always deeply intelligent - remain as popular with readers as they are with students and academics. The highly successful Cambridge Companion has been fully revised to take account of new departures in scholarship since it first appeared. The second edition includes new chapters on race, nation and empire, sexuality, aesthetics, visual culture and the public sphere. The remaining chapters, as well as the guide to further reading, have all been fully updated. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf remains the first port of call for students new to Woolf's work, with its informative, readable style, chronology and authoritative information about secondary sources.a

Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy

Virginia Woolf's Greek Tragedy PDF Author: Nancy Worman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474277810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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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.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf PDF Author: Susan Sellers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521896940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
A revised and fully updated edition, featuring five new chapters reflecting recent scholarship on Woolf.

Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader

Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader PDF Author: Helen Wussow
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1942954131
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Edited collection from acclaimed contemporary Woolf scholars, addressing the theme of Virginia Woolf and the Commonwealth reader.

Virginia Woolf in Context

Virginia Woolf in Context PDF Author: Bryony Randall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110700361X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Covering a wide range of historical, theoretical, critical and cultural contexts, this collection studies key issues in contemporary Woolf studies.

Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed

Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed PDF Author: Kathryn Simpson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472590686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf is one of the best-known and most influential modernist writers; an iconic figure, her image and reference to her work and life appear in the most varied of cultural sites. Her writing is, however, in many ways kaleidoscopic and has given rise to a diverse and, sometimes, conflicting body of critical work. Whilst Woolf envisaged that her readers could be 'fellow-worker[s]' in the creative process, there is much to perplex any reader approaching her writing, especially for the first time. Drawing on some of the main critical debates and on Woolf's non-fictional writings, this guide untangles some of the difficulties and perplexities that can prove a barrier to understanding of Woolf's writing. These include aspects of the process of writing (such as narrative techniques, formal structures, characterisation), as well as the thematic concerns so central to Woolf's writing, the cultural context in which it emerged and to recent criticism, including representations of gender and sexuality, class and race.

Colonial Odysseys

Colonial Odysseys PDF Author: David Adams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Works such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust explore the relationship between Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was at its height. David Adams observes that, because of their structure and specific literary allusions, they also demand to be read in relation to the epic tradition. The elegantly written and powerfully argued Colonial Odysseys focuses on narratives published in English between 1890 and 1940 in which protagonists journey from the familiar world of Europe to alien colonial worlds. The underlying concerns of these narratives, Adams discovers, are often less political or literary than metaphysical: in each of these fictions a major character dies as a result of the journey, inviting reflection on the negation of existence. Repeatedly, imaginative encounters with distant, uncanny colonies produce familiar, insular presentations of life as an odyssey, with death as the home port. Expanding postcolonial and Marxist theories by drawing on the philosophy of Hans Blumenberg, Adams finds in this preoccupation with mortality a symptom of the failure of secular culture to give meaning to death. This concern, in his view, shapes the ways modernist narratives reinforce or critique imperial culture—the authors project onto British imperial experience their anxieties about the individual's relation to the absolute.