The Captain S Death Bed Other Essays

These twenty-five short essays demonstrate the beauty of style, the wit, and the sensibility for which Woolf is admired. "This book contains...the same delicious things to read as always....Virginia Woolf was a great artist, one of the glories of our time, and she never published a line that was not worth reading" (Katherine Anne Porter). Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

In the first comprehensive study of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader, Katerina Koutsantoni draws on theorists from the fields of sociology, sociolinguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism to investigate the thematic pattern underpinning these books with respect to the persona of the 'common reader'. Though these two volumes are the only ones that Woolf compiled herself, they have seldom been considered as a whole. As a result, what they reveal about Woolf's position with regard to the processes of writing, reading, and critical analysis has not been fully examined. Koutsantoni challenges the critical commonplace that equates Woolf's strategy of self-effacement and personal removal from her works as a necessary compromise that allowed her to achieve authorial recognition in a male-dominated context. Rather, Koutsantoni argues that an investigation of impersonality in Woolf's essays reveals the potential of the genre to function both as a vehicle for the subjective and dialogic expression of the author and reader and as a venue for exploring topics with which the ordinary reader can relate. As she explores and challenges the meaning of impersonality in Woolf's Common Reader, Koutsantoni shows how the related issues of subjectivity, authority, reader-response, intersubjectivity, and dialogism offer useful perspectives from which to examine Woolf's work.

In this broad-ranging and ambitious intervention in the debates over the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of cosmopolitanism, Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues that modernist literary style has been crucial to new ways of thinking and acting beyond the nation. While she focuses on modernist narrative, Walkowitz suggests that style conceived expansively as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness helps to explain many other, nonliterary formations of cosmopolitanism in history, anthropology, sociology, transcultural studies, and media studies. Walkowitz shows that James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and W. G. Sebald use the salient features of literary modernism in their novels to explore different versions of transnational thought, question moral and political norms, and renovate the meanings of national culture and international attachment. By deploying literary tactics of naturalness, triviality, evasion, mix-up, treason, and vertigo, these six authors promote ideas of democratic individualism on the one hand and collective projects of antifascism or anti-imperialism on the other. Joyce, Conrad, and Woolf made their most significant contribution to this "critical cosmopolitanism" in their reflection on the relationships between narrative and political ideas of progress, aesthetic and social demands for literalism, and sexual and conceptual decorousness. Specifically, Walkowitz considers Joyce's critique of British imperialism and Irish nativism; Conrad's understanding of the classification of foreigners; and Woolf's exploration of how colonizing policies rely on ideas of honor and masculinity. Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Sebald have revived efforts to question the definitions and uses of naturalness, argument, utility, attentiveness, reasonableness, and explicitness, but their novels also address a range of "new ethnicities" in late-twentieth-century Britain and the different internationalisms of contemporary life. They use modernist strategies to articulate dynamic conceptions of local and global affiliation, with Rushdie in particular adding playfulness and confusion to the politics of antiracism. In this unique and engaging study, Walkowitz shows how Joyce, Conrad, and Woolf developed a repertoire of narrative strategies at the beginning of the twentieth century that were transformed by Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Sebald at the end. Her book brings to the forefront the artful idiosyncrasies and political ambiguities of twentieth-century modernist fiction.

Poetics of the Iconotext makes available for the first time in English the theories of the respected French text/image specialist, Professor Liliane Louvel. A consolidation of the most significant theoretical materials of Louvel's two acclaimed books, L'Oeil du Texte: Texte et image dans la littérature anglophone and Texte/Image: Images à lire, textes à voir, this newly conceived work introduces English readers to the most current thinking in French text/image theory and visual studies. Focusing on the full spectrum of text/image relations, from medieval illuminated manuscripts to digital books, Louvel begins by introducing key terms and situating her work in the context of significant debates in text/image studies. Part II introduces Louvel's s typology of pictorial saturation through which she establishes a continuum along which to measure the effect of the most figurative to the most literal images upon writerly and readerly textual 'spaces.' Part III adopts a phenomenological approach towards the reading-viewing experience as expressed in conceptual categories that include the trace, focal range, synesthesia, and rhythm and speed. The result is a provocative interplay of the categorical and the subjective that invites readers to think at once more precisely and more inventively about texts, images, and the intersections between the two.

Focusing on the last will and testament as a legal, literary, and cultural document, Cathrine O. Frank examines fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras alongside actual wills, legal manuals relating to their creation, case law regarding their administration, and contemporary accounts of “curious wills” in periodicals. Her study begins with the Wills Act of 1837 and poses two basic questions: What picture of Victorian culture and personal subjectivity emerges from competing legal and literary narratives about the will, and how does the shift from realist to modernist representations of the will accentuate a growing divergence between law and literature? Frank’s examination of works by Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E.M. Forster reveals the shared rhetorical and cultural significance of the will in law and literature while also highlighting the competition between these discourses to structure a social order that emphasized self-determinism yet viewed individuals in relationship to the broader community. Her study contributes to our knowledge of the cultural significance of Victorian wills and creates intellectual bridges between the Victorian and Edwardian periods that will interest scholars from a variety of disciplines who are concerned with the laws, literature, and history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set complements the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the finest contemporary authors who possesses that increasingly rare distinction of being a writer who is both popular with the general reading public and well-respected within the academic community. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels presents eighteen fresh perspectives on the author's work that will appeal to those who read him for pleasure or for purposes of study. Established and rising critics reassess Ishiguro's works from the early 'Japanese' novels through to his short story cycle Nocturnes, paying particular attention to The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go. They address universal themes such as history, memory and mortality, but also provide groundbreaking explorations of diverse areas ranging from the posthuman and 'minor literature' to ethics, science fiction and Ishiguro's musical imagination. Featuring an insightful interview with Ishiguro himself, this collection of essays constitutes a significant contribution to the appreciation of his novels, and forms a lively and nuanced constellation of critical enquiry. Preface by Brian W. Shaffer. Essays by: Jeannette Baxter, Caroline Bennett, Christine Berberich, Lydia R. Cooper, Sebastian Groes, Meghan Marie Hammond, Tim Jarvis, Barry Lewis, Liani Lochner, Christopher Ringrose, Victor Sage, Andy Sawyer, Motoyuki Shibata, Gerry Smyth, Krystyna Stamirowska, Motoko Sugano, Patricia Waugh, Alyn Webley.