Virginia Woolf's Ethics of the Short Story aims at a synthetic appraisal of Woolf's short stories as a space of encounter and a site of resistance. It throws a new light on Woolf's short stories as foregrounding the ethical as well as the political and the aesthetic and shows how they participate fully in her creative process.

In the mid-twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published ‘Six Articles on London Life’ in Good Housekeeping magazine, a popular magazine where fashion, cookery and house decoration is largely featured. This first book-length study of what Woolf calls ‘little articles’ proposes to reassess the commissioned essays and read them in a chronological sequence in their original context as well as in the larger context of Woolf’s work. Drawing primarily on literary theory, intermedial studies, periodical studies and philosophy, this volume argues the essays which provided an original guided tour of London are creative and innovative works, combining several art forms while developing a photographic method. Further investigation examines the construct of Woolf’s essays as intermedial and as partaking both of theory and praxis; intermediality is closely connected here with her defense of a democratic ideal, itself grounded in a dialogue with her forebears. Far from being second-rate, the Good Housekeeping essays bring together aesthetic and political concerns and come out as playing a pivotal role: they redefine the essay as intermedial, signal Woolf’s turn to a more openly committed form of writing, and fit perfectly within Woolf’s essayistic and fictional oeuvre which they in turn illuminate.

In Trespassing Boundaries , ten contemporary Woolf scholars discuss a broad range of Woolf's short stories. Despite being now easily available these stories have not yet received the attention they deserve. Complex yet involving, they deserve to be read not only for the light they shed on the novels, but in their own right, as major contributions to the short fiction as a genre. This volume places Woolf's short stories in the context of modernist experimentalism, then explores them as ambitious attempts to challenge generic boundaries, undercutting traditional distinctions between short fiction and the novel, between experimental and popular fiction, between fiction and nonfiction. Collectively the essays suggest that Woolf's contribution to the short story is as important as her contribution to the novel.

Revisiting Virginia Woolf's most experimental novels, Elsa Högberg explores how Woolf's writing prompts us to re-examine the meaning of intimacy. In Högberg's readings of Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, intimacy is revealed to inhere not just in close relations with the ones we know and love, but primarily within those unsettling encounters which suspend our comfortable sense of ourselves as separate from others and the world around us. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy locates this radical notion of intimacy at the heart of Woolf's introspective, modernist poetics as well as her ethical and political resistance to violence, aggressive nationalism and fascism. Engaging contemporary theory – particularly the more recent works of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – it reads Woolf as a writer and ethical thinker whose vital contribution to the modernist scene of inter-war Britain is strikingly relevant to critical debates around intimacy, affect, violence and vulnerability in our own time.

A Companion to Virginia Woolf is a thorough examination of her life, work, and multiple contexts in 33 essays written by leading scholars in the field. Contains insightful and provocative new scholarship and sketches out new directions for future research Approaches Woolf's writing from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, including modernism, post-colonialism, queer theory, animal studies, digital humanities, and the law Explores the multiple trajectories Woolf’s work travels around the world, from the Bloomsbury Group, and the Hogarth Press to India and Latin America Situates Woolf studies at the vanguard of contemporary literature scholarship and the new modernist studies

'The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious expression. . .So heavy the woman came to a standstill opposite the oval shaped flowerbed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying.' Virginia Woolf's short fiction has long been acknowledged as the place where she tried out some of her more experimental techniques before adopting and adapting them for use in her novel-length works. While this is certainly true, it is also the case that these short pieces are now increasingly being recognized as important works of art in their own right, rather than simply flights of experimental fancy awaiting their full actualization in the novel form. This new edition edited by Bryony Randall emphasises the startling variety in Woolf's experimentation during the most productive period of short fiction writing in Woolf's life, the late 1910s through to the end of the 1920s. It draws readers' attention to the deep political engagements evident across the range of her work and on the recent burgeoning of work in modernist print culture to set out the importance of the material context of these works' initial publication and reception.

Leading international scholars illuminate the party's significance in Modernism In 12 chapters internationally distinguished scholars explore the party both as a literary device and as a forum for developing modernist creative values, opening up new perspectives on materiality, the everyday and concepts of space, place and time. There are chapters on Conrad and domestic parties, T S Eliot's 'Prufrock', the party vector in Joyce's 'The Dead' and Finnegans Wake, Katherine Mansfield's party stories, Virginia Woolf's idea of a party, the textual parties of Proust, Ford Madox Ford and Aldous Huxley and the real-life parties of Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, the black 'after-party' of the Harlem Renaissance and the parties in extremis in D H Lawrence's Women in Love. Like guests at a party, the chapters talk to and argue with each other. They contribute different approaches: formal, historical, thematic, biographical and theoretical. They address gender and sexuality, race, genre, class, sociality and privacy. And they establish critical viewpoints. The party is shown to be the site both of introspection and self-display. It provokes competition, collaboration and violence. It is an occasion of nihilism as well as a model for creative production. Key Features: Develops the concept of space, currently of central concern to Modernist scholars Explores the tensions between Modernism as an aesthetics of intensity and Modernism as a movement of the everyday Adds a new and vital area of research to investigations of Modernism as the product of intellectual and social networks

Virginia Woolf is one of the best-known and most influential modernist writers; an iconic figure, her image and reference to her work and life appear in the most varied of cultural sites. Her writing is, however, in many ways kaleidoscopic and has given rise to a diverse and, sometimes, conflicting body of critical work. Whilst Woolf envisaged that her readers could be 'fellow-worker[s]' in the creative process, there is much to perplex any reader approaching her writing, especially for the first time. Drawing on some of the main critical debates and on Woolf's non-fictional writings, this guide untangles some of the difficulties and perplexities that can prove a barrier to understanding of Woolf's writing. These include aspects of the process of writing (such as narrative techniques, formal structures, characterisation), as well as the thematic concerns so central to Woolf's writing, the cultural context in which it emerged and to recent criticism, including representations of gender and sexuality, class and race.

A Handbook on Woolf's achievements as an innovative novelist and pioneering feminist theorist. It studies her life, her works, her relationships with other writers, her professional career, and themes in her work including among others feminism, sexuality, education, and class.

Virgina Woolf is the greatest of all British women writers and one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century writing. She was a novelist utterly immersed in books, wholly original, passionate, vivid and with a steely dedication to her art. Yet given that what we value about Woolf's life is her nine great novels, most writing about her tends to revolve around her social life and the planet of the Bloomsbury set. Julia Briggs' aim in this fresh, absorbing new book is to put the writing back absolutely at the centre of Woolf's life; to read that life through her books, using the novels themselves to create a compelling new form of biography. Using Woolf's own matchless commentary on the creative process through her letters, diaries and essays, Julia Briggs has produced a book which is a convincing, moving picture of an artist at full stretch, but also a brilliant meditation on the whole nature of creativity.