Virginia Woolf And The Bloomsbury Avant Garde

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's London extension of Cambridge, Virginia Woolf came of age in the prewar decades, when progressive political and social movements gave hope that Europe "might really be on the brink of becoming civilized," as Leonard Woolf put it. For pacifist Bloomsbury, heir to Europe's unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace—and, in E. M. Forster's words, "the only genuine movement in English civilization"— the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarities within Europe: belligerent nationalisms, rapacious racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems, a tragic and unnecessary war that mobilized sixty-five million and left thirty-seven million casualties. An avant-garde in the twentieth-century struggle against the violence within European civilization, Bloomsbury and Woolf contributed richly to interwar debates on Europe's future at a moment when democracy's triumph over fascism and communism was by no means assured. Woolf honed her public voice in dialogue with contemporaries in and beyond Bloomsbury— John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry to Sigmund Freud (published by the Woolfs'Hogarth Press), Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and many others—and her works embody and illuminate the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought. An ambitious history of her writings in relation to important currents in British intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century, this book explores Virginia Woolf's narrative journey from her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her last, Between the Acts.

A revised and fully updated edition, featuring five new chapters reflecting recent scholarship on Woolf.

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces Woolf's art and thought in dialogue with Bloomsbury, Britain's modern heir to the unfinished Enlightenment project of human rights, democratic self-governance, and world peace. For Bloomsbury the 1914 "civil war" exposed barbarity within European civilization-belligerent nationalism, racialized economic imperialism, oppressive class and sex/gender systems-the Versailles Peace fostered totalitarianism and led to a second world war. An avant-garde in the struggle against the violence within, Bloomsbury contributed richly to interwar debates as liberal democracy, socialism, fascism, and communism contended over Europe's future.From her first novel, The Voyage Out, to her last, Between the Acts, Woolf honed her public voice alongside Bloomsbury contemporaries John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield and others. An ambitious analysis of Woolf's major writings in light of the historical conditions to which they respond, this volume illuminates the convergence of aesthetics and politics in post-Enlightenment thought and opens a new chapter in Woolf studies.

Virginia Woolf and the European Avant-Garde: London, Painting, Film and Photography explores the aesthetics of Woolf’s image of London in her writings. The image of London does not make Woolf a “stay-at-home” writer. Through her life long engagement with the visual arts, art criticism and philosophy, Woolf finds related expression in literature, as one can see in her narrative: the Post-Impressionist dual vision of painting in writing, Cubist cinematic flashback and montage of shots, and Surrealist snapshort of life, death and desire. Woolf’s narrative from defines her own modernism in the context of the city. Her vision shows the dialectics of inner and outer spheres, in which the aesthetics of the urban gendered gaze is significant.【秀威資訊科技股份有限公司製作】

This book is an invaluable guide to the body of criticism on Virginia Woolf. It includes comprehensive and insightful chapters on different approaches to Woolf, including feminist, historicist, postcolonial and biographical. The essays provide concise summaries of the key works in the field as well as an engaging description of the approach itself.

For students of modern literature, the works of Virginia Woolf are essential reading. In her novels, short stories, essays, polemical pamphlets and in her private letters she explored, questioned and refashioned everything about modern life: cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, feminism, politics and war. Her elegant and startlingly original sentences became a model of modernist prose. This is a clear and informative introduction to Woolf's life, works, and cultural and critical contexts, explaining the importance of the Bloomsbury group in the development of her work. It covers the major works in detail, including To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and the key short stories. As well as providing students with the essential information needed to study Woolf, Jane Goldman suggests further reading to allow students to find their way through the most important critical works. All students of Woolf will find this a useful and illuminating overview of the field.

This edition presents the greatest short stories of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Virginia Woolf is one of the most famous English writers who was a novelist, diarist, letter writer, polemicist and critic as well as a short story teller. Content: Kew Gardens Monday or Tuesday A Haunted House and Other Short Stories Mrs Dalloway's Party The Complete Shorter Fiction "Carlyle's House and Other Sketches"

This volume features new essays by eminent and emerging Woolf scholars from around the world, focusing on Virginia Woolf's and Bloomsbury's politics. Themes include war, freedom of the press, economics and cultural production, the Hogarth Press, the global circulation of ideas, and transformations to the public sphere.