Woolf’s Ambiguities

Woolf’s Ambiguities PDF Author: Molly Hite
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501714465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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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.

Woolf’s Ambiguities

Woolf’s Ambiguities PDF Author: Molly Hite
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501714465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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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.

Ambiguous Discourse

Ambiguous Discourse PDF Author: Kathy Mezei
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807866938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Carefully melding theory with close readings of texts, the contributors to Ambiguous Discourse explore the role of gender in the struggle for narrative control of specific works by British writers Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Mina Loy. This collection of twelve essays is the first book devoted to feminist narratology--the combination of feminist theory with the study of the structures that underpin all narratives. Until recently, narratology has resisted the advances of feminism in part, as some contributors argue, because theory has replicated past assumptions of male authority and point of view in narrative. Feminist narratology, however, contextualizes the cultural constructions of gender within its study of narrative strategies. Nine of these essays are original, and three have been revised for publication in this volume. The contributors are Melba Cuddy-Keane, Denise Delorey, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman, Janet Giltrow, Linda Hutcheon, Susan S. Lanser, Alison Lee, Patricia Matson, Kathy Mezei, Christine Roulston, and Robyn Warhol.

All the Lives We Ever Lived

All the Lives We Ever Lived PDF Author: Katharine Smyth
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760633
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most. “Transcendent.”—The Washington Post • “You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TOWN & COUNTRY Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death—a calamity that claimed her favorite person—she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel—and crafts an elegant reminder of literature’s ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author. Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived “This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. . . . Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive.”—The New Yorker “Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth’s book is a memoir that’s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father’s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer. . . . An experiment in twenty-first century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.”—Vogue “Deeply moving – part memoir, part literary criticism, part outpouring of longing and grief… This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art.”—The Times Literary Supplement “Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story... gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.”—Time

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf

The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf PDF Author: Anne E. Fernald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198811586
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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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.

Virginia Woolf and Classical Music

Virginia Woolf and Classical Music PDF Author: Emma Sutton
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748637885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This study is a groundbreaking investigation into the formative influence of music on Virginia Woolf's writing. In this unique study Emma Sutton discusses all of Woolf's novels as well as selected essays and short fiction, offering detailed commentaries on Woolf's numerous allusions to classical repertoire and to composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Sutton explores Woolf's interest in the contested relationship between politics and music, placing her work in a matrix of ideas about music and national identity, class, anti-Semitism, pacifism, sexuality and gender. The study also considers the formal influence of music - from fugue to Romantic opera - on Woolf's prose and narrative techniques. The analysis of music's role in Woolf's aesthetics and fiction is contextualized in accounts of her musical education, activities as a listener, and friendships with musicians; and the study outlines the relationship between her 'musicalized' work and that of contemporaries including Joyce, Lawr

Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf

Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf PDF Author: K. Simpson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230228437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This book brings a new dimension to the critical debate about the complex relationship of Woolf to the marketplace and commodity culture through a focus on the gift economy at work in Woolf's writing, exploring the political subversiveness of the gift and its significance in her modernist aesthetics.

Does It Really Mean That? Interpreting the Literary Ambiguous

Does It Really Mean That? Interpreting the Literary Ambiguous PDF Author: Janka Kaščáková
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443827495
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
However disconnected the essays in the volume might appear to be at first glance, the unifying factor is the very notion of ambiguity—which is one of the essential features of the postmodern age: how it can be defined as opposed to what it means or is, where it can be found, to what purposes it can be put, including questions of whether it is a positive or negative factor. But this, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Writers have always depended on equivocation, multiplicity of meaning, uncertainty of meaning—deliberate mystification one might say. Language itself is the base of ambiguity not only in literature but in everyday public discourse. Thus the papers in the volume should appeal not only to scholars working in the fields of modern or postmodern literature, but those who see the importance of ambiguity in the earlier texts, and perhaps their influences in later writing. Finally the essays included here not only provide specific analyses and proposed solutions for specific works or authors they also open the reader to other appearances of ambiguity, often not simply in literature or critical theory, but in the kinds of social issues the literary works deals with.

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity PDF Author: R. S. Koppen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748641564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity places WoolfA's writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s, and theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.C. Flugel. Bringing together studies in fashion, body culture and modernism, the book explores the modern fascination with sartorial fashion as well as with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice.Fashion was deeply implicated with the nineteenth-century modern and remained in focus for the modernities that continued to be proclaimed in the early decades of the following century. Clothing connects with the modernist topoi of the threshold, the trace and the interface; it is the place where character becomes image and where relations between subject and object, organic and inorganic play themselves out in a series of encounters and ruptures. Clothes also facilitate explorations in modern materialism, for instance as informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. WoolfA's work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, "e;thinking through clothes"e; in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future.Key Features: *Contributes new research to Woolf and Modernism studies*Explores the significance of textual representations of dress and sartorial fashion in modernist literature *Interdisciplinary approach which brings together studies of fashion, culture and literature*Adds a specific author focused analysis to current work on cultural embodiment and performance

Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory

Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory PDF Author: Derek Ryan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748676457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Derek Ryan demonstrates how materiality is theorised in Woolf's writings by focusing on the connections she makes between culture and nature, embodiment and environment, human and nonhuman, life and matter.

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity PDF Author: R. S Koppen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748688552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Newly available in paperback, this study places Woolf's writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s