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.

A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women’s creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages. To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom. The author entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.

An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sistersStella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.

This collection of essays and other writings does justice to Virginia Woolf's reputation as a major essayist and critic, it offers appraisals of Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë and Katherine Mansfield amongst others.

“Night and Day” is a 1919 novel by Virginia Woolf. The story is set in Edwardian London and follows the lives and loves of Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, exploring questions concerning women's suffrage and the relationships between marriage, love, success, and happiness. Highly recommended for those with an interest in feminism and not to be missed by fans of Woolf's seminal work. 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. Woolf was a central figure in the feminist criticism movement of the 1970s, her works having inspired countless women to take up the cause. 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. Other notable works by this author include: “Pattledom” (1925), “Flush - A Biography” (1933), and “The Waves” (1931). Read & Co. Classics is proudly republishing this novel now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned biography of the author.

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.