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This study takes up Woolf's challenge to probe the relationship between education and work, specifically her education and her work as an essayist. It expands her education beyond her father's library to include not only a broader examination of her homeschooling but also her teaching at Morley College and her early book reviewing. It places Virginia Stephen's learning in the historical and cultural contexts of education for women, the working classes and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Weaving together Virginia Stephen's homeschooling, her teaching and her writing for the newspapers, Beth Rigel Daugherty demonstrates how these three strands shape Virginia Woolf's essay persona, her essays and her relationship with her readers. She also shows why Virginia Stephen's apprenticeship compels Virginia Woolf to become a pedagogical essayist. The volume publishes two holograph draft lectures by Virginia Stephen for the first time and mines rarely used archival materials. It also includes five appendices, one detailing Virginia Stephen's library and another her apprenticeship essays.This is the first in a two-volume study of Virginia Woolf's essays that analyses Virginia Stephen's development and Virginia Woolf's achievements as an essay writer.

The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings.Winner of the Toni Morrison Society Book Prize for Best Single-Authored Book, 2019-2022Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is the most important American novelist since Faulkner, the most significant American woman writer since Dickinson, and the most widely read African American public intellectual of the last half century. Her influence as a writer, critic, editor, teacher, and scholar is profound: she changed the face of literature and literary criticism in the US, if not worldwide. Yet despite the ever-expanding field of Morrison scholarship, no book tracing her critical reception has existed, until now. The book is as much a cultural history of America as a reception history of an American writer.Morrison worked brilliantly in many genres - fiction, of course (novels and short stories); drama/staged performance; poetry; non-fiction on historical, social, and political issues; and critical writings on the work of others and on her own work. She generated a literary-critical methodology that recognizes and embraces rather than ignores the African American presence in US literature, and thus transformed American academics'attitude toward American letters. The story of Morrison's achievement in making a home for herself - and for other women and people of color - in the stony bedrock of'white male'American literature is the subject of this book.

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artist novels, American women writers challenge cultural, social, and legal systems that attempt to limit or diminish women's embodied capabilities outside of the domestic. Women writers such as E.D.E.N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Jessie Fauset, and Zelda Fitzgerald use the artist novel to highlight the structural and material limitations that women artists face when attempting to achieve critical success while navigating inequitable marriages and social codes that restrict women's mobility, education, and pursuit of vocation. These artist-rebel protagonists find that their very bodies demand an outlet to articulate desires that defy patriarchal rhetoric, and this demand becomes an artistic drive to express an embodied knowledge through artistic invention. Ultimately, these women writers empower their heroines to move beyond prescribed patriarchal identities in order to achieve autonomous subjectivity through their artistic development, challenging stereotypes surrounding gender, race, and ability and beginning to reshape cultural notions of marriage, motherhood, and artistry at the turn of the twentieth century.

With thirty-nine original chapters from internationally prominent scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf is designed for scholars and graduate students. Feminist to the core, each chapter examines an aspect of Woolf's achievement and legacy. Each contribution offers an overview that is at once fresh and thoroughly grounded in prior scholarship. Six sections focus on Woolf's life, her texts, her experiments, her life as a professional, her contexts, and her afterlife. Opening chapters on Woolf's life address the powerful influences of family, friends, and home. The section on her works moves chronologically, emphasizing Woolf's practice of writing essays and reviews alongside her fiction. Chapters on Woolf's experimentalism pay special attention to the literariness of Woolf's writing, with opportunity to trace its distinctive watermark while'Professions of Writing', invites readers to consider how Woolf worked in cultural fields including and extending beyond the Hogarth Press and the TLS. The'Contexts'section moves beyond writing to depict her engagement with the natural world as well as the political, artistic, and popular culture of her time. The final section on afterlives demonstrates the many ways Woolf's reputation continues to grow, across the globe, and across media, in ideas and in artistic expression. Of particular note, chapters explore three distinct Woolfian traditions in fiction: the novel of manners, magical realism, and the feminist novel.

Challenging the tendency of scholars to view women writers of the modernist era as isolated artists who competed with one another for critical and cultural acceptance, Women Making Modernism reveals the robust networks women created and maintained that served as platforms and support for women's literary careers. The essays in this volume highlight both familiar and lesser-known writers including Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, Emma Goldman, May Sinclair, and Mary Hutchinson. For these writers, relationships and correspondences with other women were key to navigating a literary culture that not only privileged male voices but also reserved most financial and educational opportunities for men. Their examples show how women's writing communities interconnected to generate a current of energy, innovation, and ambition that was central to the modernist movement. Contributors to this volume argue that the movement's prominent intellectual networks were dependent on the invisible work of women artists, a fact that the field of modernist studies has too long overlooked. Amplifying the reality of women's contributions to modernism, this volume advocates for an “orientation of openness” in reading and teaching literature from the period, helping to ease the tensions between feminist and modernist studies.

Arguing that sound is integral to Virginia Woolf's understanding of literature, Elicia Clements highlights how the sonorous enables Woolf to examine issues of meaning in language and art, elaborate a politics of listening, illuminate rhythmic and performative elements in her fiction, and explore how music itself provides a potential structural model that facilitates the innovation of her method in The Waves. Woolf's investigation of the exchange between literature and music is thoroughly intermedial: her novels disclose the crevices, convergences, and conflicts that arise when one traverses the intersectionality of these two art forms, revealing, in the process, Woolf's robust materialist feminism. This book focuses, therefore, on the conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the musico-literary pairing. Correspondingly, Clements uses a methodology that employs theoretical tools from the disciplines of both literary criticism and musicology, as well as several burgeoning and newly established fields including sound, listening, and performance studies. Ultimately, Clements argues that a wide-ranging combination of these two disciplines produces new ways to study not only literary and musical artifacts but also the methods we employ to analyze them.

Modernism, Sex, and Gender is an up-to-date and in-depth review of how theories of gender and sexuality have shaped the way modernism has been read and interpreted from its inception to the present day. The volume explores four key aspects of modernist literature and criticism that have contributed to the new modernist studies: women's contributions to modernism; masculinities; sexuality; and the intersection of gender and sexuality with politics and law. Including brief case studies of such writers as May Sinclair and Radclyffe Hall, this book is a valuable guide for those looking to understand the history of critical thought on gender and sexuality in modernist studies today.

Focusing on the biographies and autobiographies published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press from 1917-1946, Claire Battershill shows the importance of publishing history in understanding modernist literary work and culture. Modernist Lives draws on archival material from the Hogarth Press Business Archive and first editions from the Virginia Woolf Collection at the E. J. Pratt Library to show how the Woolfs'literary theories were expressed in all aspects of their publishing: their marketing strategies, editorial practice and the literary composition of their acquisitions. Featuring the works of figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, Viola Tree, Vita Sackville-West and the Woolf's themselves, Battershill illuminates the history of Hogarth books from their composition to their reception by readers and critics.

In this critical study, Tidwell examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. At the same time, as a feminist, Woolf wanted to incorporate her political interests in her fiction, but overt political statement conflicted with her aesthetic ideals. Her solution was to combine innovative narrative techniques and subject matter traditionally associated with women. Tidwell analyzes several of Woolf's novels, including To the Lighthouse, Jacob's Room, and Between the Acts to elucidate the diary's technique and form, as well as to cast it as a valuable contribution to Woolf's canon.

This book for the first time brings together Gillian Beer's essays on Virginia Woolf.