Virginia Woolf And The Politics Of Style

This readable, informed, and insightful book illustrates the effects Virginia Woolf's feminism had on her art. Woolf's committed feminism combined with her integrity as an artist and her ability to metamorphose ideology into art make her work particularly suitable for a study of the complex relationship of polemic to aesthetics. There is hardly a more crucial issue for the feminist artist today, who must seek a successful fusion of her principles with her art. For the student of this art Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style provides a means to evaluate the success or failure of these strategies. While Woolf's essays reflect a strong if somewhat quirky feminism, she was highly critical of didacticism in fiction. For that reason her novels at first glance appear relatively free of polemic. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style reveals that her feminism is more accurately described as latent in the novels, having been merged into the aesthetic components of style, structure, point of view, and patterns of imagery.

Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity places WoolfA's writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s, and theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.C. Flugel. Bringing together studies in fashion, body culture and modernism, the book explores the modern fascination with sartorial fashion as well as with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice.Fashion was deeply implicated with the nineteenth-century modern and remained in focus for the modernities that continued to be proclaimed in the early decades of the following century. Clothing connects with the modernist topoi of the threshold, the trace and the interface; it is the place where character becomes image and where relations between subject and object, organic and inorganic play themselves out in a series of encounters and ruptures. Clothes also facilitate explorations in modern materialism, for instance as informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. WoolfA's work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, "e;thinking through clothes"e; in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future.Key Features: *Contributes new research to Woolf and Modernism studies*Explores the significance of textual representations of dress and sartorial fashion in modernist literature *Interdisciplinary approach which brings together studies of fashion, culture and literature*Adds a specific author focused analysis to current work on cultural embodiment and performance

This readable, informed, and insightful book illustrates the effects Virginia Woolf's feminism had on her art. Woolf's committed feminism combined with her integrity as an artist and her ability to metamorphose ideology into art make her work particularly suitable for a study of the complex relationship of polemic to aesthetics. There is hardly a more crucial issue for the feminist artist today, who must seek a successful fusion of her principles with her art. For the student of this art Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style provides a means to evaluate the success or failure of these strategies. While Woolf's essays reflect a strong if somewhat quirky feminism, she was highly critical of didacticism in fiction. For that reason her novels at first glance appear relatively free of polemic. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style reveals that her feminism is more accurately described as latent in the novels, having been merged into the aesthetic components of style, structure, point of view, and patterns of imagery.

In Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations , Anna Snaith explores the centrality of ideas of public and private in Woolf's life and writing. The book offers a fresh understanding of Woolf's feminism, her narrative techniques, her attitudes to publication, and her role in public debate. It draws on new manuscript material and previously unexplored letters to Woolf from her reading public.

Rescues the particularities of Virginia Woolf's political and social participation, tracing her career as an activist across forty-five yearsClara Jones re-reads Woolf's fiction and non-fiction in light of her examination of the details of Woolf's involvement with Morley College, the People's Suffrage Federation, the Women's Co-operative Guild and the National Federation of Women's Institutes. Drawing on extensive archival research into these organisations, Jones also positions Woolf's activism with regard to the institutional contexts in which she worked. Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist demonstrates the degree to which Woolf was sensitive to the internal politics and conflicts of the bodies she was associated with and the ways in which she interrogated her ambivalent attitudes towards her activism throughout her literary career.Focusing on texts that represent the range of Woolf's literary output, this book includes essays, unpublished sketches, Woolf's social realist 1919 novel Night and Day, and her final, visionary novel Between the Acts. This approach to Woolf's writing takes an integrated view, incorporating her juvenilia and foregrounding Woolf's critically neglected early novels. Rather than offering readings of Woolf's well-known 'political' works, Jones instead uncovers the unexpected ways in which Woolf's activism made its way into unlikely texts.Key FeaturesIncludes two new transcriptions of material by Woolf: the 'Report on Teaching at Morley College' ('Morley Sketch') and the 'Cook Sketch'Provides insights into the histories of neglected institutions through accounts of Woolf's activismExplores a range of texts, reading across genres with an alertness to class and gender politics in each case

In Woolf's writings Greece and Greek tragedy in particular shape an exoticized aesthetic space that both emerges from and enables critique of the cosy settings and colonialist conceits of elite (and largely male) British attitudes toward culture and politics. Rather than highlighting Woolf's exclusion from male intellectual purviews, as so many scholars have emphasized, this book urges attention on how her engagements with Greek tragedy both collude with and challenge modernist aesthetics and contemporary politics. Woolf's encounters with and uses of Greek tragedy fantasize an alternative perceptual capacity that correlates to feminine (and feminist) modes, which are depicted in her writings as alternately defiant and choral. In this scheme, Greek tragedy is something of a dreamland, the mysterious dynamics of which Woolf treats as transcending cultural attitudes that hinge upon imperialist adventuring and violence. As scholars have recognized, especially in recent decades, the exoticizing gestures central to the work of so many modernists have uncomfortable political underpinnings, since they frequently inhabit imperialist and colonialist perspectives while appearing to critique them. Unlike most scholars, Nancy Worman argues that Woolf is no exception, although the feminism and humour that inflects so many "Greek" elements in her work saves it from the worst offenses.

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.

Newly available in paperback, this study places Woolf's writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s