Virginia Woolf And 20th Century Women Writers

This book provides utstanding, in-depth scholarship by renowned literary critics; great starting point for students seeking an introduction to the theme and the critical discussions surrounding it. Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf & 20th Century Women Writers introduces readers to the major turning points that occurred during this revolutionary time period. The essays in this volume showcase the multivalent nature of Woolf's life and fiction, along with her pervasive and varied influence on a diverse array of women writers from Britain, Ireland, America, New Zealand, and the Caribbean. The women writers that were chosen represent Woolf's transatlantic appeal across ethnic and national lines, across affinity and influence, friendship and mentorship. The first essay explores the double vision of reflection and refraction that blurs the boundary between the interior and exterior in Woolf's extended essay A Room of One's Own (1929), an inspirational and controversial centerpiece of feminism. The next four critical context essays lay an introductory foundation that imparts a broad vision of Woolf's historical context and critical reception, and then a more concentrated comparison and close textual analysis of Woolf's works. Turning the focus towards women writers who interacted with Woolf or her writings via affinity, influence, or friendship, the next eleven essays in the volume convey comparative, critical readings of a wide variety of texts that reveal intertextual convergences with Woolf's feminist perspectives. Works discussed in Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers include the most important and most frequently discussed women's writings that ultimately lead to the success of the women's suffrage movement, including "The most amazing senses of her generation": Colourist Design in Katherine Mansfield's Fiction by Angela Smith, Rebecca West: Twentieth-Century Heretical Humanist by Bernard Schweizer, Killing the Angel and the Monster: A Comparative and Postcolonial Analysis of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Virginia Woolf's "The Voyage Out" by Mich Yonah Nyawalo, "It Had Grown in a Machine": Transience of Identity and the Search for a Room of One's Own in "Quicksand and Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral" by Christopher Allen Varlack, Parties, Pins, and Perspective: Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, and Matrilineal Inheritance by Emily Daniell Magruder, An Irish Woman Poet's Room: Eavan Boland's Debt to Virginia Woolf by Helen Emmitt, Spaciousness and Subjectivity in Alice Walker's Womanist Prose: From Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" to a Garden with "Every Color Flower Represented" by Sarah L. Skripsky, Raced Bodies, Corporeal Texts: Narratives of Home and Self in Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street" by Shanna M. Salinas, Destabilizing Life Writings: Narrative and Temporal Ruptures in "The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Orlando" by Quynh Nhu Le, and Narrative Forms and Feminist (Dis)Contents: An Intertextual Reading of the Prose of Tony Morrison and Virginia Woolf by Sandra Cox. Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers offers such a diverse mosaic of women writers, who resist the external imposition of patriarchal definitions of identity, demonstrates the multifaceted appeal of Woolf's feminist legacy, as delineated in A Room of One's Own, where she beckons women writers to privacy and independence, courage and creativity as they begin to fill the blank page. Her legacy lives on today in the essays included in this volume, which not only provide innovative scholarship, but also an extensive range of critical perspectives on twentieth-century women writers, writers who have sought the new sentence and sequence that Woolf summons, writers who have developed a powerful poetry and prose of their own. This influential title, Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf and 20th Century Women Writers, will benefit a wide range of academic and literary research needs. Its critical readings and in depth critical contexts will be useful for all students, researchers, or anyone interested in learning more about Woolf's influence on women's writings in the 20th century. - Publisher.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Literatur, Note: 2.0, Universität Paderborn, Veranstaltung: Selected Novels in the first half of the 20th century, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the most important female authors in the transitional period from Victorian age to the Edwardian age. Until her death at the age of 59 she published several novels, feminist essays and held two classes in Cambridge about "Women and Fiction". In this term paper I would like to introduce the feminism aspects of her life and novels, and give an over-view of the essays she wrote. After giving a short introduction with the most important facts about Virginia Woolf's life, my first intention is to define the theory of feminism and show how it affected Virginia already as a young girl and mainly as an independent woman. Later, three of her novels are taken to demonstrate how Virginia Woolf's development influenced her literary output. I would also like to show the differences between Virginia Woolf's attitude towards women and men and compare it to theories of the feministic movement in the 20th century. This will be followed by a summary and conclusion, and a Bibliography, which only shows the most relevant books published for this subject, for there are numerous biographies and essays written on Virginia Woolf's life.

A Room of One's Own is a very clear example of how creative thinkers connect and present things in novel ways. Based on the text of a talk given by Virginia Woolf at an all-female Cambridge college, Room considers the subject of 'women and fiction.' Woolf’s approach is to ask why, in the early 20th century, literary history presented so few examples of canonically 'great' women writers. The common prejudices of the time suggested this was caused by (and proof of) women's creative and intellectual inferiority to men. Woolf argued instead that it was to do with a very simple fact: across the centuries, male-dominated society had systematically prevented women from having the educational opportunities, private spaces and economic independence to produce great art. At a time when 'art' was commonly considered to be a province of the mind that had no relation to economic circumstances, this was a novel proposal. More novel, though, was Woolf's manner of arguing and proving her contentions: through a fictional account of the limits placed on even the most privileged women in everyday existence. An impressive early example of cultural materialism, A Room of One's Own is an exemplary encapsulation of creative thinking.

How do writers and their readers imagine the future in a turbulent time of sex war and sex change? And how have transformations of gender and genre affected literary representations of "woman," "man," "family," and "society"? This final volume in Gilbert and Gubar's landmark three-part No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century argues that throughout the twentieth century women of letters have found themselves on a confusing cultural front and that most, increasingly aware of the artifice of gender, have dispatched missives recording some form of the "future shock" associated with profound changes in the roles and rules governing sexuality. Divided into two parts, Letters from the Front is chronological in organization, with the first section focusing on such writers of the modernist period as Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and H.D., and the second devoted to authors who came to prominence after the Second World War, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and A.S. Byatt. Embroiled in the sex antagonism that Gilbert and Gubar traced in The War of the Words and in the sexual experimentations that they studied in Sexchanges, all these artists struggled to envision the inscription of hitherto untold stories on what H.D. called "the blank pages/of the unwritten volume of the new." Through the works of the first group, Gilbert and Gubar focus in particular on the demise of any single normative definition of the feminine and the rise of masquerades of "femininity" amounting to "female female impersonation." In the writings of the second group, the critics pay special attention to proliferating revisions of the family romance--revisions significantly inflected by differences in race, class, and ethnicity--and to the rise of masquerades of masculinity, or "male male impersonation." Throughout, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the impact on literature of such crucial historical events as the Harlem Renaissance, the Second World War, and the "sexual revolution" of the sixties. What kind of future might such a past engender? Their book concludes with a fantasia on "The Further Adventures of Snow White" in which their bravura retellings of the Grimm fairy tale illustrate ways in which future writing about gender might develop.

Virginia Woolf is the most famous twentieth-century woman writer in English. This book explores the relation between her life and her work, and charts the development of the writer who has done the most to alter the common reader's understanding of the relationship between gender and writing. Examining a wide range of novels from throughout her career, this book follows Woolf's progression from the celebration of femininity in her earlier work to her later wariness of the dangers of creating a category of 'the feminine' which might prove restrictive to women. It is argued that there is a shift in Woolf's writing from an interest in the difference of femininity to an interest in femininity as difference in a wider, philosophical sense. The book thus re-reads Woolf as a writer whose work centres on the dichotomy which continues to structure our thinking about sexual difference: between essentialism and constructionism, between the idea of gender as fixed and given and the idea of gender as socially constructed and thus open to change. In placing Woolf's writing within this dichotomy, rather than attempting to read it exclusively from one or the other perspective, this book takes the terms of debate beyond the partiality of earlier feminist accounts of her work.

A collection of essays dealing with a variety of subjects including modern writing, feminism and education. In Women and Fiction Virginia Woolf considers the reasons why so many educated women began writing novels in the 18th century. In another she discusses the lack of education that women received and the narrowness of conventional education.

During The Last Few Centuries Women Writers Have Considerably Widened And Deepened The Areas Of Human Experience With Their Sharp, Feminine Perception Of Life Successfully Transmuted Into Verbal Artifact. The World Body Of Literature In English Would Have Been Much Poorer Today But For The Contribution Of Women Writers. The New Series Studies In Women Writers In English Is A Grateful Acknowledgment Of That Contribution And Public Recognition Of Their Voice.The Twenty-Three Essays Included In This Fourth Volume Of The Series Cover A Wide Spectrum Of Women Writers Across Space And Time. The Women Writers Discussed In This Volume Include Five From Britain: Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Doris Lessing, And Of Course Virginia Woolf, The Twentieth Century Stalwart Of British Novel, Who Has Left Her Indelible Mark On The Art Of Fiction As Well As On Women Writers And Feminist Thinkers Of The Subsequent Decades. We Also Get A Glimpse Of The Entire Corpus Of Writers Engaged With The Feminist Theatre Of America Today, In Addition To Two African-American Talents, I.E. Toni Morrison, The Nobel Laureate For Literature In 1993, And Alice Walker, The Eminent Black American Woman Writer, And A Host Of Contemporary Indian Writers, Particularly With Reference To Their Recent Work, Including Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Shobhaa De, Manju Kapur, Nayantara Sahgal, As Well As Two Émigré Indian Writers Bharati Mukherjee And Jhumpa Lahiri.Since Most Of The Authors Discussed In These Articles Are Prescribed In The English Syllabus In The Universities Of India, Both The Teachers And The Students Will Find Them Extremely Useful, And The General Readers Who Are Interested In Literature In English And/Or Women Writers Will Also Find Them Intellectually Stimulating.

Orlando is generally considered Woolf's most accessible and influential novels. Concerning the 300 year life of a man born during the reign of Elizabeth I and his quest to write a great poem, having love affairs as both man and women against the backdrop of some of the most important moments in European history. This novel has been hugely influential stylistically and is still an important moment in literary history and particularly in women's writing and gender studies. Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer. She is widely hailed as being among the most influential modernist authors of the 20th century and a pioneer of stream of consciousness narration. She suffered numerous nervous breakdowns during her life primarily as a result of the deaths of family members, and it is now believed that she may have suffered from bipolar disorder. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse at Lewes, aged 59. Read & Co. Classics is proudly republishing this classic novel now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.