Woolf Criticism Research Articles

Whimsical criticism

ABSTRACT For many decades, Virginia Woolf's reputation in the history of literary criticism has been as a heroic rebel and challenger to the dominant forms and institutions of literary criticism. This legacy has rightfully been celebrated. Yet this view tends to treat Woolf's idiosyncratic and whimsical writings in relation to and in opposition to the prevailing standards of academic criticism rather than as a serious, normatively coherent form of criticism in its own right. Thus, this essay takes up the hypothesis that Woolf's critical writing constitutes a methodologically coherent criticism, even while it understands the values of reading and literature in deeply different terms. Taking up Woolf's whimsical criticism offers an important alternative practice of criticism capable of mediating between professional and everyday forms of reading. Pursuing Woolf's criticism also allows the essay to unfold some of the values that subtend and continue to shape the hidden norms of literary criticism today.

“Domestic Houseflies” and “Giant Cucumbers”: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Literary Criticism and Women Writers of the Long Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACT Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) is frequently considered the single most influential work that helped establish feminist literary criticism as a discipline. It continues to be a key feminist text today: scholars avidly debate how Woolf's criticism instigated, but also thwarted and distorted, the study of women's literary history. Apart from A Room, Woolf also engaged extensively with women's literary history both in her fictional and non-fictional writing. I argue that it is important to put A Room in dialogue with both Woolf's early essays about eighteenth-century women writers and her writing about literary history and aesthetics. Re-reading A Room in light of this is a useful exercise because it helps us understand that Woolf's feminist literary history project is not solely based on women's economic entrance into the literary marketplace, but that, for Woolf, literary aesthetics played an important part in women's inclusion or exclusion in literary history. In examining Woolf's conception of women's literary history of the long eighteenth century, this essay sheds new light on the close entanglement of aesthetics and feminist politics in Woolf's writing.

Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy by Elsa Högberg

Reviewed by: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy by Elsa Högberg Pamela L. Caughie VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE ETHICS OF INTIMACY, by Elsa Högberg. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 234 pp. $108.00 hardback; $35.95 paperback; $28.76 ebook. Elsa Högberg's Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy is an intelligent and important book, but it is not an easy read. Its prose style is fluid, and its close readings illuminating, yet it rightly demands of the reader a theoretical sophistication and a studied attention appropriate to its subject matter. Steeped in the poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Krsiteva—especially their writings from the twenty-first century that together develop what the author calls "an ethics of intimacy"—this book revises our notions of both Virginia Woolf's narrative ethics and modernist concepts of intimacy (p. 8). Högberg writes that intimacy is "a central term in the academic discourse of our century," entailing relations other than familial, sexual, erotic, or compassionate to encompass face-to-face encounters with strangers with whom one may have no emotional connection (p. 6). Such encounters in Woolf's writings render boundaries separating subject and subject, as well as subject and object, porous, creating a "vertiginous state, into which the reader is drawn" (p. 13). To remain outside that state, to retain a distinctive self and to see the other as distinct from oneself, is to engage in a sort of "ethical violence" (p. 16). In Högberg's compelling account, Woolf's modernist aesthetics, her famed exploration of "the atoms as they fall," has profound ethical implications, and it positions Woolf's writings in the "historical genealogy of thought" that extends from the modernists to the poststructuralist theorists discussed here (p. 22). Intimacy, not empathy, becomes in Woolf's art a means of resisting violence and rendering national as well as individual boundaries permeable, unstable, and thus open to reconfiguration. As Högberg forcefully declares, "It is high time that we politicise Woolf's modernist writing of interiority" (p. 28). This book shows us how this is possible, if we have the patience to work through its intricate and elegant argument. Högberg's deep familiarity and engagement with contemporary Woolf criticism provides a useful overview of the current state of Woolf scholarship, even as it insists on the continuing value of the poststructuralist [End Page 357] approaches of the later twentieth century. In the poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of Butler, Irigaray, and Kristeva—as in Woolf's mid-career novels, Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931)—Högberg finds "a more viable model for non-violent relations" than that offered by Freudian theory (p. 21). Rather than simply reading Woolf's novels through the grid of poststructuralist theories, Högberg more usefully understands these contemporary theories as comprising "a legacy of modernist configurations of intimacy" (p. 22). That historical genealogy is made all the more evident through Högberg's close readings of Woolf's aesthetics in accordance with writings by her contemporaries, such as Roger Fry, Walter Benjamin, and Bertrand Russell, as well as contemporary theorists. Pairing novels with theorists—for example, reading the melancholic structure of Jacob's Room in relation to Kristeva's writing on melancholia, and Lily Briscoe's and Woolf's aesthetic experiments in To the Lighthouse in terms of Irigaray's notion of intimacy as entailing both nearness and "irrevocable distance"—works to illuminate both the challenging theories and Woolf's particular aesthetic concerns in each novel (p. 116). Yet the chronological progression of chapters focused on a single novel can work against a more integrated understanding of the ethical consequences of Woolf's poetic experiments. If, for example, her reading of Jacob's Room aligns it more with Woolf's late work, as the author says, then perhaps presenting that reading in close proximity to The Waves might help readers make that connection. For all its brilliance in theorizing Woolf's modernist aesthetics of interiority as a non-violent ethics aligned with a new conception of intimacy found in the recent writings of Butler, Irigaray, and Kristeva...

Virginia Woolf's The Waves and the Everyday

In the early days of Woolf criticism, the well-known Woolf scholar Stuart Clarke suggests, it was simple. If a potential reader of Woolf's fiction were to ask where he or she should start, “the ans...

The Historical Novel at History’s End: Virginia Woolf’s The Years

It seems as if there were no progress in human race, but only repetition. --Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) The recent surge of interest in late modernism has expanded purview of modernist studies in at least two directions: on one hand, study of late modernism addresses lesser known literary and cultural activity may not adhere to stylistic or periodizing norms of modernism or postmodernism; on other hand, it draws late works of household names such asT. S. Eliot, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf from shadows of their more lauded counterparts from teens and twenties. (1) Woolf's late fiction has been prime focus of this latter direction. In Jed Esty and Marina MacKay's foundational studies, Between Acts exemplifies formal and historical distinctiveness of late modernism. (2) But where does The fit within this broadening, vibrant field? How might this often overlooked novel also be historically and aesthetically exemplary? The has not figured heavily in history of Woolf criticism. To be sure, this hefty chronicle of Pargiter family scarcely resembles svelte, introverted novels preceded it. It lacks rapturous of To Lighthouse and hypnotic lines of The Waves; it displays little of daring characterization of Jacob's Room or Mrs. Dalloway. By comparison, The falls shy of achieving what Woolf called merger of the granite and rainbow (New 235), concrete and poetic. Indeed, Woolf herself declared it a and curiously characterized failure as deliberate (Writer 277). after its publication she would remember novel only as that misery The Years (Diary 340). (3) The remained stray, ugly duckling, an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise handsome career. (4) More recent critical assessments of The seem less beholden either to Woolf's judgments or to near reflexive equation of high modernist with literary value. Karen Levenback, Judy Suh, Anna Snaith, and Maren Linett have all recast The as central to Woolf's political thinking on war, fascism, and, perhaps more complexly, anti-semitism. (5) In these readings, The exemplifies Woolf's imaginative confrontations with mounting crises of 1930s. John Whittier-Ferguson ties social and political turmoil of decade to local details of her style and what he memorably dubs her inventively exhausted prose (231). My reassessment of The joins this renewed attention to tangled aesthetic and political problems of Woolf's novel. I treat The as late modernist version of historical novel, one seems primarily concerned with establishing correspondence between minutiae of everyday lives of Pargiter family and world-historical processes underwrite novel's near fifty-year timespan. Of course, Woolf s concern with everyday life did not begin with this novel, but The marks an astonishing departure from signature interiorized, phenomenological explorations of her earlier fictions. (6) The treatment of everyday life in The bears stronger resemblances to historical novels and family chronicles like Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Thomas Mann's Buddenhrooks, and John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga than anything one might find in her earlier novels or even in her modernist fellow travelers like Joyce, Proust, or Conrad. (7) By attending to Woolf's reworking of formal features of historical novel--plot, event, characterization--we can see The registering protracted decline of British centered world-system as crisis of historical consciousness. (8) In this late novel, Woolf figures everyday as scene where historical crises of 1930s attain legibility. In what follows, I first examine Woolf's use and reconfiguration of historical novel, genre long thought to belong to great realists. …

In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature (review)

Reviewed by: In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature Alison Lacivita In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature. Bonnie Kime Scott. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. xv + 272. $39.50 (cloth). Bonnie Kime Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature is a very welcome addition to Woolf studies, a product of increasing interest in Woolf and the environment. Perhaps the first monograph to address the intersection of modernism and nature through an ecocritical perspective, Scott’s study provides intriguing insights into how the concept of nature impacted Woolf’s life and work, and it paves the way for future inquiry into the possibility of an ecocritical modernism. Predictably, Scott chooses to focus on an ecofeminist approach to Woolf while also drawing on postcolonial ecocritical theory. Her introduction explains that she has chosen the word “uses” for the title of her study because the word “calls attention to nature as a deliberate discourse, rather than essence or aesthetic decoration” (3). This small word, “use,” coheres the study in many respects. There is no one unifying way in which Woolf presents nature; rather, she offers a plethora of different representations dependent upon character, context, and time, and this subjectivity of nature is what guides the study. As Scott concludes at the end of the first chapter, “We now have the theoretical insight to consider the ways that nature itself is a cultural construction, variable with the ages, and highly political, as empowered intellectuals, or nations, seek to regulate or to collect nature for their own ends. Modernism provides a fine example, and Virginia Woolf a case worth pursuing in depth” (41). The first chapter, “Towards a Greening of Modernism,” situates Woolf within a larger context of literary modernism and nature, discussing a diverse range of writers including H. D., Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. Scott writes of the “reinsertion” of nature into modernist studies (was it ever there in the first place?), supported by the somewhat weak assertion that modernists “regularly make reference to nature, or its control, in their writing” (13). The second chapter, “Diversions of Darwin and Natural History,” is perhaps the strongest; it covers some hallowed ground in Woolf studies (Gillian Beer) and provides absorbing glimpses into the Stephen family’s relationship to natural history. From Leslie Stephen’s admiration of Gilbert White (45) to Thoby’s extensive bird-watching records and sketches (56–57) to Virginia’s diary records of family trips to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington as early as 1897 (48), Scott builds a convincing base for many of her arguments concerning Woolf’s texts. The next two chapters, “Limits of the Garden as Cultured Space” and “The Art of Landscape, the Politics of Place,” also cover familiar ground in Woolf criticism, but they provide some curious readings, particularly in terms of the Bloomsbury circle’s engagement with nature (mostly in terms of the visual arts), the construction of “Englishness” through images of the rural landscape, and issues of gender and class as they relate to perceptions of nature. Particularly interesting is Scott’s discussion of gardens and flowers as forming part of the material text, an idea which stems from Vanessa’s woodcuts for Virginia’s pieces. For example: “In a 1927 illustrated version of Kew Gardens, flowers and leaves surround the words of the text,” for which there is also an accompanying image (90). Many of the thought provoking readings of Woolf’s “uses” of nature in Scott’s study, and in these two chapters in particular, are supported by the extensive archival research undertaken for the project; the photographs of Woolf with red-hot pokers, of Leslie Stephen with his “Alpine Guide,” and of Woolf and Vita Sackville-West with their spaniels are just a few examples of ephemera that support and complement the text. Another strong quality of this study is how Scott demonstrates nature seeping into Woolf’s life at all points, a tendency that the author illustrates through the careful accumulation and presentation of seemingly small details extending from archival research. According to...

Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader by Maren Linett

852 Reviews and Caliban (she rehearses anxieties about the status of the literary character in Chapter 1) rather than the plays more pervasive meditation on relativism. Perhaps more problematically, Ratcliffe avoids engagement with historicist read ings of literature (historical excavations do not extend beyond the anecdotal). This creates tensions in confident assertions that, 'During the 1940s, writers and philo sophers were emphasizing theway inwhich people were responsible for his own self-creation' [sic] (p. 131), and Ratcliffe's reading of Browning with Shakespeare is specifically limited by her unwillingness to examine the conditions of nineteenth century Shakespearian encounters, which were as often derived from the page as the stage (p. 115). Furthermore, recent scholarship on Victorian poetry's reflexive nature might have helped deliver a more nuanced consideration of the?quite possible?ethical, emotional, and even moral responses that can be elicited by 'marks on the page' (p. 47). Ratcliffe admits that 'coming to a conclusion about Beckett's work isn't easy' (p. 216). The same may be said of her own work. Certainly there are thought provoking passages and a lengthy, useful bibliography. How such a study will influence the future directions of literary reading is less certain. Despite its title, one senses that its limits are too rigorously defended to allow truly refreshing breezes to blow, no matter how tempestuous its island inspiration. University of Glasgow Rhian Williams Virginia Woolf: AnMFS Reader. Ed byMaren Linett. Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press. 2009. xv+443 pp. ?18. ISBN 978-0-8018-9118-2. For those readers experiencing, in thewords of one of the essayists collected here, 'the vertigo of reading Woolf for the first time' (p. 61), this ensemble of pieces from Modern Fiction Studies may have a steadying effect.At the same time, it may introduce them to another kind of instructive dizziness, namely that induced by the busy whirl ofWoolf criticism. As Brenda Silvers opening essay demonstrates, Woolfs ever increasing visibility inmainstream and popular culture has been too often querulous. It is good to remind ourselves of the literary-aesthetic, and literary-critical, reasons forwhich Woolf has been found important?a purpose well served byMaren Linett's collection. The collection is arranged into three themed sections, and within those divisions Woolfs texts are treated inbroadly chronological sequence. The essays themselves, however, are not presented chronologically. Those of the first section represent work from 1988, 1992, 1972, 1968, 1956, and 1981 respectively; and much the same is true of the second section. Readers wishing to form an impression of how Woolf criticism has developed, at least in the pages of this journal, will have to refer to the back of the volume, where each piece isdated. The collection does not offer major discussion ofA Room ofOne's Own, though Three Guineas does receive some comparative attention in Linett's own contribution. Discounting Mark Hus sey's terse 'Afterword', thirteen of the twenty essays are bywomen. MLR, 105.3, 2010 853 JamesHafley's briefWinter 1956 essay on the short story 'Moments of Being: "Slaters Pins have no Points"' ishere presented along with, from the same issue, Marilyn Zorn on Between theActs. In Hafley's view, reading 'Moments' would bring 'the shock that always attends the contemplation of perfection or near per fection' (p. 116). He was taken with that story's functioning '[i]ronically', with its 'paradoxical unity', and its 'ingenious ambiguity'. This was in fact testament to the influence of close reading as mediated by New Critical values, though Hafley felt the need to counter that he was 'not trying to "do an Empson" here' (p. 118), the search for 'paradox' and 'ambiguity' notwithstanding (p. 120). Zorn, too, valorized 'irony' (p. 248), 'harmony' (pp. 249, 253), 'unity' (p. 250), as well as 'allusion' and 'myth' (p. 251). These readings were not without truth, and also some charm. This was an age of innocence, when Hafley could critique a story simply because 'it happens to be my favourite' (p. 116). Justover the horizon, of course, was the explosion of theory that characterized the later 1960s and the rest of the century. The majority of the essays show its im pact and fertility.So where Zorn confined herself to noting that...

The Impersonal Strategy: Re-visiting Virginia Woolf's Position in The Common Reader Essays

The concept of impersonality as a writer's strategy has been exposed to misinterpretations that either fail to exhaust its full meaning and deposit an unequal amount of attention on all components of the term or, in the worst case, tend to distort its true elements. In relation to Virginia Woolf's criticism, in particular, it is a critical commonplace that the author employed an impersonal position in order not to fully materialise her feminist vision, but to shy away from explicitly expressing her feminist convictions and openly supporting women's rights. Indicative of this is the criticism that suggests disapproval of Woolf's reluctance to side with her own gender and declare the power of female personality. The aim here is to challenge such critical views, separate the discussion of impersonality from its association with that of androgyny, and re-visit the issue of Woolf's employment of the impersonal strategy. I examine two of Woolf's essays on nineteenth-century women writers included in her first volume of The Common Reader and offer an analysis from both a gender-oriented and a genderless angle. Woolf's strong affinity with female conditions of oppression, her modernist convictions, her need to compromise with the male-dominated context of the time and her concurrent urge to co-operate with the common reader of an unspecified sex for the sake of artistic creation reveal more complex reasons behind her intentions than those examined by critics so far.

From Supernova to Manuscript Page: Circling Woolf

Woolf criticism has reached an enviable position. No one who has read Woolf's novels at all carefully still assents to Leonard Woolf's description of her as "the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the definition" (27); Modern Fiction Studies has chosen to mark its fiftieth anniversary with this special issue; virtually every course on modern British literature now includes her, even [End Page 224] when she is the only woman taught. Woolf is securely canonical. Woolf critics are therefore free to pursue lines of inquiry that would have been difficult had the project of recovery not been so thoroughly carried through. They can, as they do in the texts under review here, delve into a range of important contexts within which Woolf lived and wrote. Situating Woolf within diverse terrains, these studies contribute what we might call "thick contextualization" to Woolf studies.

Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

A focus on art's basis in life hardly represents a new departure in Woolf criticism, particularly so when the semiautobiographical To the Lighthouse is the object of study. Critics reading this novel in light of Woolf's own retrospective commentary in her diaries and memoirs generally acknowledge the novel's therapeutic dimension and its closeness to biographical material. In her introduction to the Penguin edition, Hermione Lee writes that Woolf knew very well what she was doing for herself in writing To the Lighthouse, explaining it on at least two occasions: "I used to think of [my father] & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind." 1 "I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest." 2

The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual

Reviewed by: The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual Diane F. Gillespie Jane Goldman. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. xi + 243 pp. Jane Goldman focuses, in reverse chronological order, upon two influential aesthetic “moments” in Woolf’s life, the solar eclipse of 1927 and the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910. Revealing how selected texts by Woolf reverberate within their rich historical and cultural settings, she notes the shifting relationships within Post-Impressionism between “significant form” and color as well as between the avant-garde [End Page 526] uses of color in Post-Impressionist and suffrage art and the chiaroscuro of more traditional painting. In these contexts, she attributes to Woolf’s writing a “feminist prismatics.” Goldman uses current literary theory to good effect when it is relevant, but she gives her closest attention to the language of Woolf’s texts. While I would quibble with her readings of some passages, Goldman usually is well aware of contradictions, ambiguities, and situationally specific versus traditional connotations. She signals when she is being most speculative; in these instances (and there are many), “appears,” “seems,” “perhaps,” “may be,” “might read,” and other tentative expressions abound. She also shows considerable sensitivity to Woolf’s variations in tone—including irony, parody, and the “camping up” of experience. These qualifications and acknowledgments of complexities and multiplicities require a reader’s concentration, but the argument that emerges is coherent, illuminating, and worth the effort. Goldman’s contribution is not her opening point, based largely on selected criticism from the 1970s and 1980s, that Woolf’s aesthetics have political implications. Indeed, one wonders why a contemporary Woolf scholar finds it necessary to belabor the point. Goldman certainly is familiar with much of the formidable body of revisionist feminist criticism from the same period, and from the 1990s, since she uses it in the rest of the book as a context for her own approach. Perhaps chapter 1 is a holdover from the dissertation stage of the study, or it may reflect the degree to which the feminist voice in Woolf criticism has been more subdued in the U.K. and elsewhere than it has been in North America. The disjunction between the critical context of the first chapter and that of the rest of the book, however, makes one long for a bibliography of works cited, the lack of which may have been a press decision, not Goldman’s. Most of the many critics mentioned in the notes are not indexed unless their names appear in the text of the book, and even then one often has to search back through previous notes to get the full references. Although it is not always easy to see how well she has done, Goldman has tried to position her arguments scrupulously yet independently among those of her predecessors who study art history, the suffrage movement, Woolf and painting, Woolf and feminism, and specific Woolf texts. The first major section of Goldman’s book analyzes in detail two treatments of the 1927 eclipse, Woolf’s diary entry and her essay “The Sun and the Fish.” Marshaling a variety of contextual materials, from [End Page 527] newspaper accounts to Romantic and elegaic poetry, Druidic lore, and classical mythology, Goldman shows Woolf working with and within the traditional, hierarchical oppositions between sun/masculine and earth/shadow/feminine to posit new, more inclusive, communal modes of subjectivity and, in the process, “to enlighten the Enlightenment.” The context that is Goldman’s most intriguing contribution is the “feminist language of colours” characteristic of the early twentieth-century suffrage movement. “Purple, white and green,” the most famous of these colors, are the ones “Woolf selects to accompany ‘the defeat of the sun’ in her essay.” The colors connote “‘regeneration’ [. . .] and the idea that with them feminists were repainting, reinventing, and restructuring the world anew.” Goldman thus makes a case both for Artists’ Suffrage League art (posters, banners) as, in their own way, avant garde and for Woolf’s essay as revisionary “feminist elegaics.” In the second part of the book, “Prismatics,” Goldman returns to...

The reading of silence: Virginia Woolf in the English tradition

This is a study of Virginia Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with silence and the barrier between the sayable and the unsayable. Using a wide range of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Kristeva and Derrida, Laurence demonstrates convincingly that Woolf was the first modern woman novelist to practice silence in her writing and that, in so doing, she created a new language of the mind and changed the metaphor of silence from one of absence or oppression to one of presence and strength. It suggests new directions for Woolf criticism.

Virginia Woolf—New Critical Essays ed. by Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy

What the letters do reveal, however, is a closely knit family group, that for all its limitations and class and religious prejudice, is yet high minded, well mannered, well intentioned, proficient in at least a superficial under­ standing of the arts, and remarkably patient whenever faced with adversity. Julia Horatia Ewing is the book’s narrator, but, as far as I am concerned, its real hero is her husband, Rex Ewing, who surely must vie with Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison for the title of the perfect English gentleman. Unlike Sir Charles, however, Rex is both a likeable and a creditable character, well worth the endearments that Mrs. Ewing lavishes upon him. fred cogswell / University of New Brunswick Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, editors, Virginia Woolf— New Criti­ cal Essays (London: Vision Press; Totowa, N .J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983). 224. £ i 4-95 Cursed by centenaries in the same year, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce share both a heritage of criticism dominated by the biographical compulsion and a recent renewal of efforts to recreate the critical cliches of the last forty years by those who are either unaware of the state of the art with respect to the oeuvres of both authors or mesmerized by that heritage. Cen­ tennial celebrations have been issued by the dozen with collections of essays featured prominently in both camps. Published a little late for the great event, however, Virginia Woolf — New Critical Essays still presents itself with a brave flourish and a portrait of Woolf on the dust jacket. More than the usual number of references to Joyce and Modernism are also featured and even the jaded reader of Woolfiana may feel a mild stirring of hope at the anticipation of essays both new and perhaps novel. Alas, while the first claim proves accurate enough, the second is doomed to disappointment. Of the ten essayists whose work is represented in this volume, only two — Maria Di Battista and S. P. Rosenbaum — are already well known as authors of major studies of Woolf and Bloomsbury, and one therefore opens the book with some anticipation, hoping that fresh perspectives will be brought by writers new to their subject and that the work of established Woolf critics will again arouse interest. In the case of Rosenbaum on Leslie Stephen, Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, that hope is justified; in that of Di Battista, on “Joyce, Woolf and the Modem Mind,” rather less so while of the remaining eight essays, only Shirley Neuman’s study of Woolf’s use of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is consistently intelligent, well-written, and use­ 368 ful. Unfortunately, the editors’ own contributions are among the weakest in the collection, a liability underscored by their positioning at beginning and end of the volume. Patricia Clements’s essay on Woolf’s “Art of Narrative Fusion” focuses upon the opposing images of the flowing stream and the glacial, frozen one in Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway (the latter by far the favourite text of most contributors to this volume) in order to demonstrate what has long been known in Woolf criticism, the “ambivalent status in her work of the aesthetic image” (30). Grundy’s subject is a more unusual one, Woolf’s “choice of names” in her fiction, but Grundy assumes — in a move typical of much in the collection — that her study “may provide some glimpse into the larger, hidden workings of the author’s creative imagina­ tion” (201). Apparently unaware that she begs the question of intentionality or that her unselfconscious version of a hermeneutic strategy requires thought in itself, Grundy blithely concludes that Woolf’s taste in names was strongly marked by her very English sensibility (or “our race” as Grundy puts it with fine ethnocentrism) and her period and class, the latter a factor which seems equally invisible to Grundy. On at least two other, more important subjects — the relations of Woolf’s work to Joyce and to Modernism — the collection is equally evasive, per­ haps most surprisingly in the case of Maria Di Battista whose efforts to present the “ Modem Mind” as it appears in Joyce and Woolf founder in vapid generalizations about “Joyce’s garrulous virility and...

Pen-Envy and the Disappearing Subject: Some Recent Woolf Criticism

Pen-Envy and the Disappearing Subject: Some Recent Woolf Criticism

Towards a Virginia Woolf Criticism

Towards a Virginia Woolf Criticism

Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface

Previous articleNext article No AccessVirginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical PrefaceBarbara Currier Bell and Carol OhmannBarbara Currier Bell Search for more articles by this author and Carol Ohmann Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 1, Number 2Dec., 1974 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/447791 Views: 10Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1974 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Juliet Dusinberre Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Amateurs and Professionals, (Jan 1997): 1–39.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25644-0_1Juliet Dusinberre Virginia Woolf and Montaigne, Textual Practice 5, no.22 (Jun 1991): 219–241.https://doi.org/10.1080/09502369108582113Elmer Borklund Contemporary Literary Critics, (Jan 1977): 1–550.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81475-6_1