Virginia Woolf And The Great War

Virginia Woolf was a civilian, a noncombatant during the Great War. Unlike the war poet Wilfred Owen, she had not seen "God through mud." Yet, although she was remembered by her husband as "the least political animal . . . since Aristotle invented the definition," and called "an instinctive pacifist" by Alex Zwerdling, her experience and memory of the war became a touchstone against which life itself was measured. Virginia Woolf and the Great War focuses on Woolf's war consciousness and how her sensitivity to representations of war in the popular press and authorized histories affected both the development of characters in her fiction and her nonfictional and personal writings. As the seamless history of the prewar world had been replaced by the realities of modem war, Woolf herself understood there was no immunity from its ravages, even for civilians. Karen L. Levenback's readings of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Years, in particular—together with her understanding of civilian immunity, the operation of memory in the postwar period, and lexical resistance to accurate representations of war—are profoundly convincing in securing Woolf's position as a war novelist and thinker whose insights and writings anticipate our most current progressive theories on war's social effects and continuing presence.

This book draws together for the very first time examples of the 'aesthetic pacifism' practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. In addition, the book outlines the stories of those less well-known who shared the mind-set of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first 'total war'. The research for this study took five years, gathering evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad. This is the first time that such wide-ranging evidence has been placed together in order to paint a complete pi.

Aesthetics.

This carefully crafted ebook: "Mrs. Dalloway" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels.

Stories set during World War I. They range from Joseph Conrad's The Tale, a shipwrecked sailor's reflections on courage and patriotism, to Kay Boyle's Count Lothar's Heart, on a returning German POW.

Vincent Sherry reopens long unanswered questions regarding the influence of the 1914 war on the verbal experiments of modernist poetry and fiction. He recovers the political discourses of the British campaign, offering new readings of Woolf, Eliot and Pound.

The Great War stimulated a sudden growth in the novel industry. Well known writers such as Mrs Humphry Ward and Edith Wharton found themselves jostled by authors like Ruby M. Ayres, Kate Finzi, and Olive Dent. The trauma of the war continued to reverberate through much of the fiction published in the years that followed its inglorious end. Women's Fiction and the Great War challenges current thinking about women's responses to the First World War, questioning, even as it supports, the categorization of 'women's writing'. This volume considers some of the best known, and some of the least known, women writers on whose work the war left its shadow. The writing of some of the most famous modernist women writers - including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and HD - is reassessed as war literature, and the work of long-neglected authors such as Vernon Lee, Frances Bellerby, and Mary Butts is at last given serious attention.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II. During this period, the war began to bleed into Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf writes about Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; copies down the headlines of the day; and captures how war changed her daily life. Alongside Woolf’s own entries, Lounsberry explores the diaries of 18 other writers as Woolf read them, including the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. Lounsberry shows how reading diaries was both respite from Woolf’s public writing and also an inspiration for it. Tellingly, shortly before her suicide Woolf had stopped reading them completely. The outer war and Woolf’s inner life collide in this dramatic conclusion to the trilogy that resoundingly demonstrates why Virginia Woolf has been called “the Shakespeare of the diary.” Lounsberry’s masterful study is essential reading for a complete understanding of this extraordinary writer and thinker and the development of modernist literature.