This updated edition of Bowlby's now classic work on Woolf features five new chapters.

Recent feminist criticism has revolutionized the way we view modern literature, none more than the stories and novels of Virginia Woolf. Jane Marcus here collects twelve provocative new essays by women scholars, all of them taking feminist critical approaches to yield fresh readings of Woolf's work. Ellen Hawke's "The Magical Garden of Women" and Jane Marcus's "Thinking Back through Our Mothers" explore Woolf's relationships with women and offer a historical approach to her identification with other women writers. Marcus points out Woolf's technical achievement in the creation of a demotic chorus, the "collective sublime," in direct opposition to the "egotistical sublime" of male writers. Sara Ruddick's "Private Brothers/Public World" compares Woolf's relations with real and fictional brothers. Judy Little revises all previous readings of Jacob's Room by treating it as parody. J. J. Wilson's "Why Is Orlando Difficult?" broaches the central problem of Woolf's most notorious novel. Jane Lilienfeld's investigation of To the Lighthouse provides new insight into the Ramsays' marriage. Suzette Henke's reading of Mrs. Dalloway detects an interlacing of feminism and Christian mysticism in the novel. Madeline Moore's essay on The Voyage Out explains that puzzling novel in terms of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, again a mother-daughter relationship. Susan Squier, overturning established opinion, argues that They Years is one of Woolf's most important novels. Louise DeSalvo's "Shakespeare's Other Sister" analyzes an unpublished Woolf story. Nora Eisenberg uses "Anon," an unpublished manuscript in the Berg Collections, to elucidate Between the Acts.

This study argues that Virginia Woolf taught herself to be a feminist artist and public intellectual through her revisionary reading. Fernald gives a clear view of Woolf's tremendous body of knowledge and her contrast references to past literary periods

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.

This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women’s agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim – to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.

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

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