Routledge Library Editions Virginia Woolf

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1963 and 1990, draw together research by leading academics on Virginia Woolf, and provide a rigorous examination of related key issues. The volumes include literary criticism on Virginia Woolf’s novels, poetry, plays and essays, through the lens of linguistics, narrative theory, psychoanalysis and textual analysis, whilst also exploring the literary modernist movement. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature, history and linguistics respectively.

Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction, provides a stylistic study of the fiction of Virginia Woolf. The book examines what is generally described as a ‘traditional novel’, examining such works as Jacob’s Room, and the way in which meaning is nonetheless conveyed poetically. The book argues that her early novels, are shown to contain writing of considerable sophistication and maturity and how her major works of fiction are approached in a more specific way: Mrs Dalloway through its poetic rhythms, To the Lighthouse as a multi-perspectival exploration of a reality embodied in a single image, and The Waves as a play-poem.

Originally published in 1984, Virginia Woolf: Guide to Research is a bibliographic guide to the writings and critical reception of the works of Virginia Woolf. The guide is a simply organized guide that makes easily accessible, a diversified body of critical works on Virginia Woolf. The scholarship is organised into key collections, based around Woolf’s major works of fiction, and contains studies from a variety of content, including periodicals, articles, book chapters as well as foreign-language books.

Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language explores the relationship between madness and the disruption of linguistic and structural norms in Virginia Woolf’s modernist novels, opening new ground in Woolfian studies, as well as in psychoanalytic criticism. Focusing on Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, it investigates narrative strategies, showing that Woolf’s writings question their own origins and connection with madness and suicide. By combining textual analysis with an original use of autobiographical material, the books cause us to reconsider the full complexity of the articulation between an author’s life and work.

Originally published in 1962, Virginia Woolf, provides a commentary on the literary work of Virginia Woolf – examining not only her the novels, but also the considerable body of criticism surrounding her work. Along with the essential biographical details of Woolf, the books recreates the atmosphere of ‘the Bloomsbury Group’ and gives us a valuable insight into a very rich period of English literature, involving such figures as Leslie Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, Christopher Isherwood, David Garnett and others. The book provides a comprehensive account of Virginia Woolf’s body of work and will be of interest to academics and students alike.

Originally published in 1979, this volume argues that it is Woolf's pre-occupation with form which is her overriding artistic concern, and not feminism. In this original critical study, Rosenthal considers her non-fiction as well as fiction, exploring the different ways Woolf sought to embody her artistic vision throughout her remarkable literary career. The books establish both the intellectual and social setting of the Bloomsbury world in which she lived, and includes detailed discussions of all her work. Woolf's unending quest to express, as she says, 'the exact shapes my brain holds', provides us with a new method of appreciating her total achievement as a writer.

Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding – or creating – their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.

This book explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. Ann Ronchetti locates the sources of Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family heritage, her exposure to Walter Pater and the aesthetic movement, and the philosophical and aesthetic interests of the Bloomsbury group.