Virginia Woolf The Frames Of Art And Life

An attempt to illuminate Virginia Woolf's aesthetic by providing an original thoery regarding her use of the random frames provided by life. Her novels are shown to use windows, thresholds, mirrors and, less directly, rooms to frame scenes which chart the border between life and art.

The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf’s novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics. An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf’s processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself – a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text. The study investigates key dimensions of aesthetic vision. It addresses vision in the context of theories of aesthetic experience and identifies a semantics of seeing. It analyses functions of symbolic materiality in the presentation of boundaries of perception, modes of temporality and poetic potentialities. In exploring the connections between vision and language, it seeks to provide new perspectives for a reassessment of what occurs in Modernism's relation to vision.

Rachel Bowlby's anthology of articles conjures up the enormous richness and variety of recent work that returns to Woolf not so much for final answers as for insights into questions about writing, literary traditions and the differences of the sexes. The collection includes pieces by such well-known writers as Gillian Beer, Mary Jacobus, Peggy Kamuf and Catharine Stimpson. With a substantial Introduction, headnotes to each piece and full supporting material, this volume provides an ideal guide to Woolf and her place in modern literary and cultural studies.

The pleasure and excitement of exploring Virginia Woolf's writings is at the heart of this book by a highly respected Woolf critic and biographer. Julia Briggs reconsiders Woolf's work--from some of her earliest fictional experiments to her late short story, 'The Symbol', and from the most to the least familiar of her novels--from a series of highly imaginative and unexpected angles. Individual essays analyse Woolf's neglected second novel, Night and Day and investigate her links with other writers (Byron, Shakespeare), her ambivalent attitudes to 'Englishness' and to censorship, her fascination with transitional places and moments, with the flow of time (and its relative nature), her concern with visions and revision and with printing and the writing process as a whole. We watch Woolf as she typesets an extraordinarily complex high modernist poem (Hope Mirrlees's 'Paris'), and as she revises her novels so that their structures become formally - and even numerologically - significant. A final essay examines the differences between Woolf's texts as they were first published in England and America, and the further changes she occasionally made after publication, changes that her editors have been slow to acknowledge. Julia Briggs brings to these discussions an extensive knowledge of Woolf both as a scholar and as an editor. She records her findings and observations in a lively, graceful and approachable style that will entice readers to delve further and more meaningfully into Woolf's work

This reader's guide to Mrs. Dalloway brings to light a web of allusions weaved into one of Virginia Woolf's most read novels.

Modernism: An Anthology is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. Amply represents the giants of modernism - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett. Includes a generous selection of Continental texts, enabling readers to trace modernism’s dialogue with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Frankfurt School. Supported by helpful annotations, and an extensive bibliography. Allows readers to encounter anew the extraordinary revolution in language that transformed the aesthetics of the modern world .

Although marginal and often neglected genres, the sketch and the essay represented for Virginia Woolf the two forms of writing through which she articulated her understanding of the workings of literary history. In this innovative study, Elena Gualtieri analyses in detail the intersection between essays and sketches in Woolf's non-fiction as part of a far-reaching argument about the scopes and models of feminist criticism, its understanding of the historical process and its position in the panorama of twentieth-century intellectual history.

Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, Donna Lazenby shows how these thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from an entirely new direction. This book provides a warning against reductive scientific and philosophical models that impoverish our understanding of ourselves and the world, and a powerful endorsement of ways of knowing that give art, and a restored concept of contemplation, their consummative place.