This book for the first time brings together Gillian Beer's essays on Virginia Woolf. Widely recognised as a leading authority on Woolf and a sophisticated critic of modernism and fiction, Beer's essays make fascinating reading. Beer demonstrates, through close investigative textual readings, how Woolf's conceptualisations of history and narrative are intimately bound up with her ways of thinking about women, writing and social and sexual relations.

In the first comprehensive study of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader, Katerina Koutsantoni draws on theorists from the fields of sociology, sociolinguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism to investigate the thematic pattern underpinning these books with respect to the persona of the 'common reader'. Though these two volumes are the only ones that Woolf compiled herself, they have seldom been considered as a whole. As a result, what they reveal about Woolf's position with regard to the processes of writing, reading, and critical analysis has not been fully examined. Koutsantoni challenges the critical commonplace that equates Woolf's strategy of self-effacement and personal removal from her works as a necessary compromise that allowed her to achieve authorial recognition in a male-dominated context. Rather, Koutsantoni argues that an investigation of impersonality in Woolf's essays reveals the potential of the genre to function both as a vehicle for the subjective and dialogic expression of the author and reader and as a venue for exploring topics with which the ordinary reader can relate. As she explores and challenges the meaning of impersonality in Woolf's Common Reader, Koutsantoni shows how the related issues of subjectivity, authority, reader-response, intersubjectivity, and dialogism offer useful perspectives from which to examine Woolf's work.

Virginia Woolf was not a religious person in any traditional sense, yet she lived and worked in an environment rich with religious thought, imagination, and debate. From her agnostic parents to her evangelical grandparents, an aunt who was a Quaker theologian, and her friendship with T. S. Eliot, Woolf’s personal circle was filled with atheists, agnostics, religious scholars, and Christian converts. In this book, Stephanie Paulsell considers how the religious milieu that Woolf inhabited shaped her writing in unexpected and innovative ways. Beginning with the religious forms and ideas that Woolf encountered in her family, friendships, travels, and reading, Paulsell explores the religious contexts of Woolf’s life. She shows that Woolf engaged with religion in many ways, by studying, reading, talking and debating, following controversies, and thinking about the relationship between religion and her own work. Paulsell examines the ideas about God that hover around Woolf’s writings and in the minds of her characters. She also considers how Woolf, drawing from religious language and themes in her novels and in her reflections on the practices of reading and writing, created a literature that did, and continues to do, a particular kind of religious work. A thought-provoking contribution to the literature on Woolf and religion, this book highlights Woolf’s relevance to our post-secular age. In addition to fans of Woolf, scholars and general readers interested in religious and literary studies will especially enjoy Paulsell’s well-researched narrative.

In her timely contribution to revisionist approaches in modernist studies, Lorraine Sim offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's conception of ordinary experience as revealed in her fiction and nonfiction. Contending that Woolf's representations of everyday life both acknowledge and provide a challenge to characterizations of daily life as mundane, Sim shows how Woolf explores the potential of everyday experience as a site of personal meaning, social understanding, and ethical value. Sim's argument develops through readings of Woolf's literary representations of a subject's engagement with ordinary things like a mark on the wall, a table, or colour; Woolf's accounts of experiences that are both common and extraordinary such as physical pain or epiphanic 'moments of being'; and Woolf's analysis of the effect of new technologies, for example, motor-cars and the cinema, on contemporary understandings of the external world. Throughout, Sim places Woolf's views in the context of the philosophical and lay accounts of ordinary experience that dominated the cultural thought of her time. These include British Empiricism, Romanticism, Platonic thought and Post-Impressionism. In addition to drawing on the major novels, particularly The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, Sim focuses close attention on short stories such as 'The Mark on the Wall', 'Solid Objects', and 'Blue & Green'; nonfiction works, including 'On Being Ill', 'Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car', and 'A Sketch of the Past'; and Woolf's diaries. Sim concludes with an account of Woolf's ontology of the ordinary, which illuminates the role of the everyday in Woolf's ethics.

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

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries helps us comprehend the ways that women writers and artists contributed to and complicated modernism by contextualizing them alongside Woolf's work.

This volume features new essays by eminent and emerging Woolf scholars, focusing on the aesthetics and influences of Virginia Woolf's work. Themes include eco-criticism, conceptions of intellectual women, spaces and places, and Woolf beyond Bloomsbury. The volume opens with a personal reflection by Cecil Woolf, nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

This book offers an extensive analysis of Woolf's engagement with science. It demonstrates that science is integral to the construction of identity in Woolf's novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and identifies a little-explored source for Woolf's scientific knowledge: BBC scientific radio broadcasts. By analyzing this unstudied primary material, it traces the application of scientific concepts to questions of identity and highlights a single concept that is shared across multiple disciplines in the modernist period: the idea that modern science undermined individualized conceptions of the self. It broadens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and radio, modernism and science, and demonstrates the importance of science to Woolf's later novels.

Examining the writings and life of Virginia Woolf, In the Hollow of the Wave looks at how Woolf treated "nature" as a deliberate discourse that shaped her way of thinking about the self and the environment and her strategies for challenging the imbalances of power in her own culture--all of which remain valuable in the framing of our discourse about nature today. Bonnie Kime Scott explores Woolf's uses of nature, including her satire of scientific professionals and amateurs, her parodies of the imperial conquest of land, her representations of flora and fauna, her application of post-impressionist and modernist modes, her merging of characters with the environment, and her ventures across the species barrier. In shedding light on this discourse of Woolf and the natural world, Scott brings to our attention a critical, neglected, and contested aspect of modernism itself. She relies on feminist, ecofeminist, and postcolonial theory in the process, drawing also on the relatively recent field of animal studies. By focusing on multiple registers of Woolf's uses of nature, the author paves the way for more extended research in modernist practices, natural history, garden and landscape studies, and lesbian/queer studies.

Recycling Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Art and Literature exam>ines Woolf’s life and oeuvre from the perspective of recycling and pro>vides answers to essential questions such as: Why do artists and writers recycle Woolf’s texts and introduce them into new circuits of meaning? Why do they perpetuate her iconic fgure in literature, art and popular culture? What does this practice of recycling tell us about the endurance of her oeuvre on the current literary, artistic and cultural scene and what does it tell us about our current modes of production and consumption of art and literature? This volume offers theoretical defnitions of the concept of recycling applied to a multitude of specifc case studies. The reasons why Woolf’s work and authorial fgure lend themselves so well to the notion of recy>cling are manifold: frst, Woolf was a recycler herself and had a personal theory and practice of recycling; second, her work continues to be a prolifc compost that is used in various ways by contemporary writers and artists; fnally, since Woolf has left the original literary sphere to permeate popular culture, the limits of what has been recycled have ex>panded in unexpected ways. These essays explore today’s trends of fab>ricating new, original artefacts with Woolf’s work, which thus remains completely relevant to our contemporary needs and beliefs