Reading from the outside: The uses of translation for Virginia Woolf's “common reader”

Abstract

Extending recent critical appraisals of the ways in which Virginia Woolf's politics shape her modernist narrative practices, this essay examines Woolf's non-fiction and its engagement with the political questions surrounding the production, circulation and reception of literature in translation. It proposes that the figure of the “common reader” to whom Woolf addresses many early essays intersects with that of the “Outsider”, whose refusal of national allegiance she identifies as a source of internationally influential political power in Three Guineas. However, the freedom from nationalist cultural authorities that Woolf claims for Outsiders, who necessarily “read and write in their own tongue”, neither guarantees nor even seeks complete intelligibility across cultural borders. Rather, the essays model reading practices that remain attentive to the persistent and productive traces of difference retained in translation and refuse hierarchical divisions between professional and amateur readers within Anglophone communities.