"Every secret of a writer's soul, experience of his life, and quality of his mind is written large in his work." -- Virginia Woolf Panken enables us to read this secret language without doing violence to the artistic integrity of the writing. Virginia Woolf's continuing need for maternal protection, her physical symptoms, depressive bent, anorexia, and suicidal leanings suggest her vulnerability, inner struggle, and masked rage. This book delves into the substrate of Virginia Woolf's emotional dilemmas as well as the subtexts of her novels and shows the confluence between her life and art. It brings new insights into Woolf's struggle to come to grips with her confused personal and sexual identity, into her artistic conscience, and into the conditions and motivations of her suicide.

"Every secret of a writer's soul, experience of his life, and quality of his mind is written large in his work." -- Virginia Woolf Panken enables us to read this secret language without doing violence to the artistic integrity of the writing. Virginia Woolf's continuing need for maternal protection, her physical symptoms, depressive bent, anorexia, and suicidal leanings suggest her vulnerability, inner struggle, and masked rage. This book delves into the substrate of Virginia Woolf's emotional dilemmas as well as the subtexts of her novels and shows the confluence between her life and art. It brings new insights into Woolf's struggle to come to grips with her confused personal and sexual identity, into her artistic conscience, and into the conditions and motivations of her suicide.

More than 50 after her death, Virginia Woolf remains a haunting figure, a woman whose life was both brilliantly successful and profoundly tragic. This brilliant new biography weaves together diverse strands of Woolf's life and career, offering a dazzlingly complete portrait brimming with new revelations. 64 halftone illustrations.

These models begin with analogies to the theater as arena of accepted illusion and dramatic characters as types of imposters. Political processes then come into sharper focus as the leader serves as delegate for a host of popular wishes, fears, and agendas that extend into the unconscious and comprise a group-fantasy. Group-fantasy not only empowers the delegate, but also defines and occasionally destroys this chosen figure as well.

Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson investigates a fundamental shift, from the 1920s to the present day, in the way that trauma is aesthetically expressed. Modernism's emphasis on impersonality and narrative abstraction has been replaced by the contemporary trauma memoir and an ethical imperative to bear witness.

In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood. But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness—its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function—reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.

Covering a wide range of historical, theoretical, critical and cultural contexts, this collection studies key issues in contemporary Woolf studies.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title In this second volume of her acclaimed study of Virginia Woolf 's diaries, Barbara Lounsberry traces the English writer's life through the thirteen diaries she kept from 1918 to 1929--what is often considered Woolf’s modernist "golden age." During these interwar years, Woolf penned many of her most famous works, including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and A Room of One's Own. Lounsberry shows how Woolf's writing at this time was influenced by other diarists--Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Jonathan Swift, and Stendhal among them--and how she continued to use her diaries as a way to experiment with form and as a practice ground for her evolving modernist style. Through close readings of Woolf 's journaling style and an examination of the diaries she read, Lounsberry tracks Woolf 's development as a writer and unearths new connections between her professional writing, personal writing, and the diaries she was reading at the time. Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path offers a new approach to Woolf 's biography: her life as she marked it in her diary from ages 36 to 46.

Word of Mouth focuses on the two most prominent women in British modernism, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Both wrote with an extraordinary and sometimes celebratory self-consciousness about their status as "women writers". At odds with their explicit privileging of female difference, however, are patterns of imagery that demonstrate self-revulsion and self-hatred, the woman writer's rejection of herself. Patricia Moran points out that strategies of resistance and challenge are also strategies of repudiation and revulsion directed at female embodiment. Word of Mouth reevaluates Mansfield and Woolf, focusing on the figures of the anorexic and the hysteric and on the extensive imagery of eating, feeding, starvation, suffocation, flesh, and longing that permeates both fictional and nonfictional texts; it locates this writing within the overlapping frames of psychoanalytic theory, studies of women and eating disorders, and feminist work on women's anxiety of authorship.

"A stunning, brilliant, absolutely compelling reading of Woolf through the lens of Kleinian and Freudian psychoanalytic debates about the primacy of maternality and paternality in the construction of consciousness, gender, politics, and the past, and of psychoanalysis through the lens of Woolf's novels and essays. In addition to transforming our understanding of Woolf, this book radically expands our understanding of the historicity and contingent construction of psychoanalytic theory and our vision of the potential of psychoanalytic feminism."—Nancy J. Chodorow, University of California at Berkeley "Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis brings Woolf's extraordinary craftsmanship back into view; the book combines powerful claims about sexual politics and intellectual history with the sort of meticulous, imaginative close reading that leaves us, simply, seeing much more in Woolf's words than we did before. It is the most exciting book on Woolf to come along in some time."—Lisa Ruddick, Modern Philology